Backing up photos advice

Both the cloud and a backup drive is a good option.  Office365 is easy to use and gives you 1000GB each if you want to go down that line.  It's also not a bad idea to occasionally copy it all to a hard drive in case the cloud stuff goes kaput/you forget to pay/you get hit by ransomware

Other solutions are just as valid though.  I like the O365 so I can send links to the photos to friends etc

I use an app called Carbonite which automatically backs up everything on the computer as well as an external drive. Unlimited and encrypted cloud backups for about £80 a year.

I then have another, much bigger external drive that backs up the same stuff as soon as I plug it in. Time Machine does hourly backups on Macs. I'm sure Windows has similar.

So I have off site backups to the cloud, and on site backups on an external drive.

Cloud.

Of all the things on my computer my photos are the one I couldn't stand to lose. So mine are backed up to the cloud, a couple of USB sticks and an external hard drive. The USBs are stored in different places too.

Probably overkill but it takes no time to do and gives me lots of peace of mind.

I've never understood why people don't back up important data.

Amazon prime gives you unlimited photo backup if you are paying for that already

I back up my phone pictures with Google, however, I recently discovered that they don't save folders separately. Everything is lumped in together.

I take pictures and they are stored in the main album on my phone. Any that I like and think have potential, I make small improvements with in an app called Snapseed. Those ones are then saved in a separate Snapseed album. Those are the ones I want to keep.

I only recently discovered that Google saves everything together, meaning I still technically have those photos, but they are jumbled up next to the originals with subtle differences in a massive single folder.
Still haven't discovered a way of separating these out automatically and can't face doing it manually yet.

Separating them out would be a nightmare as this goes back over ten years I reckon. 😐

So yeah, cloud is good but make sure they are stored how you want them to be.

Google photos doesn't seem to let you back up sub-folders only and not the main photo folder on an Android device, as far as I can see.

only recently discovered that Google saves everything together, meaning I still technically have those photos, but they are jumbled up next to the originals with subtle differences in a massive single folder.
Still haven’t discovered a way of separating these out automatically and can’t face doing it manually yet.

Separating them out would be a nightmare as this goes back over ten years I reckon. 😐

So yeah, cloud is good but make sure they are stored how you want them to be.

Google photos doesn’t seem to let you back up sub-folders only and not the main photo folder on an Android device, as far as I can see.

You may know this already but.... Google photos on your phone has albums, so you can add specific pics to an album then see the specific ones all in one place whether you be on a computer, phone, tablet etc... So you'll back everything up but you can see the folder "my keepers" quite easily. You'll need to manually add pics to it though within Google photos app itself, I don't think you can get Snapseed to save them into a Google photos album.

Amazon prime gives you unlimited photo backup if you are paying for that already

Ooh I'll have to look into this. The web page mentions that it works with Amazon devices (useless to most of us obvs), but can you utilise it via PC and Chrome (mobile) as well?

can you utilise it via PC and Chrome (mobile) as well

’use’? PC probably. The Amazon uploader app on MacOS got so irritating that I dropped it.

You might want to checkout the backblaze blogs on back up plans. many folks consider their approach to be reasonable. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/

Having backups means also checking and maintaining them. It is annoying to need to recover something and find that you can’t because of an avoidable problem. For example, you needed to sign back into the service.

Always interesting how folks consider e.g. photographs to be ‘the most important’ files but don’t manage and secure them against loss. Great that you weren’t caught out in the end OP. Good luck keeping things safe.

Great that you weren’t caught out in the end OP. Good luck keeping things safe.

Yep, trust us. We had them on an old computer that went tits up  - potentially could have paid an expert to try to access the drive, so not an absolute loss. But we never bothered (hence why almost 5 years out of date, it's just been sat there gathering dust) because we're not stupid and we'd also backed them up to an external drive. Well done us.

And then a few weeks ago, t'wife was wanting some old photos and lo and behold, the back up drive is actually physically lost. Of course i got the blame ("where have you moved that back up drive to?") despite not touching it.

So somewhere you can't actually physically lose is a benefit as well. Although....passwords and access......

Because I have subs/accounts with them - my phone backs up to iCloud, Google Photos and Amazon Photos!

And if it's not too many GB - then get a few memory sticks and whack them on those. Keep one in the house and another elsewhere.

But as has been said already, you need to keep an eye on technology. The oblong USB interface we are all used to is being phased out in favour of USB C. I once thought these couldn't be bettered!... 🙂

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So somewhere you can’t actually physically lose is a benefit as well. Although….passwords and access……

The other great benefit of cloud storage is that most sites will run face/object recognition on the photos so you can easily search by people, pets, that time you saw a steam train, etc 😂 and obviously search by date/location etc if that data exists.

Had a similar issue recently. We had all the pictures from when the kids were born/young (going back 20 years) on a Synology NAS that died. After much Googling and a few weeks of frustration I managed to work out how to create a Linux environment and use various tools to recover the files. They are now all on Google drive (which we can access from our phones etc). I can't remember why they are on Google drive and not Google photos but basically stick them on the cloud somewhere (as well as a local disk) then you should be fine whatever happens.

Everyone else points +1

Ours are on my laptop, an external SSD, an old WD MyCloud, and online. If the house is destroyed, google disappears, and I lose my laptop then the event that caused all that probably makes the collapse of the entirety of society more of an issue than a folder of photos labeld Portugal 2020.

n.b. don't trust spinning external drives. They need to be spun up every s often and therefore die without power. You might get lucky and plug them in after years on a shelf, or you might not, it's a coin toss.

Also, treat every copy of electronic data as you would an old lightbulb; it will stop working one day. Maybe without any warning.

Just handing your photos over to a 3rd party in the cloud isn’t a great call, while it’s unlikely that Amazon or google will go bust overnight they could lock you out of your account for various reasons.

It’s also not a great idea to use a cloud based file sync offering like onedrive or google drive as the offer little protection from ransomware attacks.

In an ideal world you would use the 3 2 1 method, 3 copies of your data, on two different medias, one of them offsite.

This might give you some more data as to why & how.