Backing up your phone: so you never lose your photos

A new phone can be bought in minutes. Photos of your children, holidays and moments that will never repeat cannot be bought. And yet one drop into water, a loss, a theft or a plain disappearance of the phone and they are gone forever. Most people deal with a backup only when it is too late. This article is about setting it up before anything happens.

The good news is that a reliable photo backup is a matter of a few minutes of setup these days. The bad news is that until you do it, you are playing roulette with your memories.

The basics: turn on automatic photo backup

This is the single most important step in the whole article. On your phone, turn on automatic photo backup to the cloud, that is Google Photos on Android or iCloud on iPhone. Once on, every new photo uploads to the server by itself and you have it even when you lose or break the phone.

It is a few minutes of setup that then runs by itself in the background. If you do nothing else, at least do this. The difference between “my photos are in the cloud” and “they were only on the phone” is the difference between a minor annoyance and an irreversible loss.

One copy is not a backup

The cloud is an excellent base, but relying on it alone is not ideal. An account can be hacked, you can delete a photo or a whole album by mistake and the deletion syncs to the cloud too, or the free space simply fills up and the backup quietly stops.

So a simple rule holds: keep important photos in two places. For example in the cloud and also copied now and then to a computer or home storage. It is the same principle we recommend for all important data, more in our guide to backup and data recovery. One copy, wherever it is, is not a backup.

What else to back up besides photos

Photos and videos are the most precious, but not the only thing. It is worth thinking about:

• Contacts, which usually sync with the account automatically, but check it so you do not lose your address book.
• Messages and chat history, especially WhatsApp, which has its own cloud backup. How to move it when changing devices we cover in the article on moving data to a new phone.
• Important documents you have only on the phone, for example photos of contracts or papers.

When the free space is full

Sooner or later the message comes that the cloud space is full. With thousands of photos it happens fast. You have two sensible options: either pay for more space, which is convenient, or download some photos and store them outside the cloud, for example on a computer or home storage, and keep only the most recent in the cloud.

This very combination, the cloud for convenience and your own copy for certainty, is the most reliable. You do not have to pay for huge space and at the same time your memories are secured in two places.

Verify the backup really runs

The most treacherous backup is one you think works but does not. You turned it on a year ago, something signed out or filled up in the meantime, and the photos have long stopped backing up, yet you do not know until the day you need them.

So check occasionally that new photos really are uploading and, above all, that you can reach the backup from another device, for example a computer via a browser. A backup you have never verified is only hope, not certainty.

Want photos at home, not with an outside company

If it bothers you that your photos sit on someone else’s servers, or you simply have too many for the cloud, the answer is home storage of the NAS type. The phone backs up to it automatically and the data does not leave your home. Once set up it runs by itself, more in the article on a NAS and a home server.

We can design and set up this solution to match exactly how much data you have and how many people in the household will use it, so your memories are safe and under your own control.

This article is part of our guide to backup and data recovery.