If Someone Tells You That iCloud Is Not A Backup, They’ve Never Lost Their iPhone.

THERE ARE THREE REASONS TO BACK UP YOUR PHOTOS AND EACH ONE NEEDS A DIFFERENT SOLUTION.

Photo by David Trinks on Unsplash

Every few days I see a social media post, YouTube video, or ad that proclaims “iCloud is not a backup” and attempts to deliver some “insider” wisdom in exchange for an email address.

Now, they aren’t entirely wrong, but they aren’t entirely right either, and that grey area may be enough to send the message “well then why bother” rather than the “tell me more” that the author intended. As a result, an estimated one third of iPhone owners aren’t using iCloud to back up their photos and may not have any backup system in place at all.

That’s a lot of iPhones and a lot of pictures.

There are 3 reasons why your digital photos are at risk, and you should understand the dynamics of each one to build a secure, worry-free photo collection.

They are:

• Lost or damaged devices

• User error

• Data corruption

LOSS AND DAMAGE

Of the 3, lost or damaged devices is the Big Dog for photo risks. Particularly for iPhones. They go everywhere with us and are exposed every day to drops, dunks, theft, neglect, and just plain failure. There are 3 iPhones in service worldwide for every Mac, so that’s a lot of data with only one easy way to create a backup - iCloud. Yes, there are other ways, but they are generally manual or more expensive than iCloud, so what are the chances someone did that?

And it’s not just iPhones. I’ve seen the remains of iPads left on a car roof until it hit the pavement at 65 miles per hour. And iMacs that suffered a lightning strike, fire damage, or floods. Digital photos that have no backup copy anywhere are living on the tightrope without a net.

Yet every one of those devices could be recreated with new hardware in a couple hours from an iCloud restore.

Don’t tell me that syncing photos to iCloud is not a backup.

Created by the Author

USER ERROR

This is the lynchpin in the backup argument because it’s personal.

None of us wants to believe we did something wrong. I get it. But technology of any kind requires some understanding of the procedures and limitations that come with it.

Saying that “iCloud is not a backup” is sending a simple message about a complex problem. And it’s not complete. Full transparency would be “iCloud is not a backup against accidental deletions.”

And that would be true.

But then it gets messy because there are few photo systems available to average users that can prevent it either, except Time Machine attached to a Mac. Synced through iCloud Photos Library.

Guarding against accidental deletions can only be handled by an incremental backup solution that stores regular updates and allows you to go back in time to recover those “lost” images. Setting that up requires some extra effort that can overwhelm an already overwhelmed user.

And it still requires a properly synced iCloud Photos backup.

Here’s the thing. Deletions are a deliberate task, not accidental. Usually driven by a misunderstanding of how the photo system works and a desire to free up space or reduce clutter. Fair enough.

It’s actually like your iPhone, ATM, and local bank branch where a withdrawal at any one of them affects your bank balance everywhere.

Syncing your devices through iCloud is a gift, not a liability. It shouldn’t be treated as such. Gone are the days when we had to manually duplicate Albums on our phone, the desktop computer, and the laptop. Or figure out which device has those honeymoon photos. The Apple Photos ecosystem syncs everything everywhere - not just the photos themselves, but the whole experience we’ve built around them.

So the very best solution against “accidental” deletions is simply education. Understand that modern photo management is based on a single collection database. It’s common to see 30k, 40k, 50k images, and we will likely double or triple that number in our lifetime. Unless you are a full time professional photographer, there’s no way to manage that manually in desktop folders. And you wouldn’t want to anyway.

So you need to treat this memory bank you love with respect. Whatever you add, or delete, happens everywhere. On all devices, including iCloud. And when you do choose to delete photos anyway, the system warns you . Just like the “Do Not Enter” sign at the end of a one way street.

DATA CORRUPTION

For the first two risks, backup solutions are pretty simple.

Use iCloud.

Don’t delete anything you’ll miss.

But bad files - corruption - can sneak up on you without warning and may not be discovered for years. In fact, archived files on older media - DVD’s, hard drives, flash drives, tape - are often the source of corrupt files.

Data corruption happens when those numbers get scrambled and make the file unreadable or full of artifacts. This can happen because of a power surge, bad sectors on a drive, deteriorated media, improper drive formatting, or bit rot, where the data itself just deteriorates over time.

The result is opening a folder full of images and seeing nothing inside. Or having a jagged green line show up across your picture. Maybe a photo won’t copy or export or sync.

Which makes data corruption the most difficult type of failure to backup against.

For synced backups like iCloud, a previously good photo may become corrupted somehow and still sync across the network, replacing the previously good image with the damaged one. But you don’t know that until the next time you actually open that image.

This is where that incremental backup comes in again. It can be Time Machine, or an online service like BackBlaze. And making a separate backup of everything to a separate drive every month or two is just additional insurance. Think of it as your archive.

This may all seem like a lot, but it isn’t. Successful, safe, enjoyable photo management comes down to four guiding principles.

1. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE - Modern photo libraries are built on the principle of a single complete collection of images that can be accessed from multiple devices. What you do on one device happens on all devices.

2. NEVER DELETE SOMETHING YOU WILL MISS - If you want to remove photos or videos to save space or declutter, move them to their own folder first, on iCloud Drive or an external hard drive, where you can verify that they’re safe. THEN delete them from your main Library.

3. USE AN ARCHIVE BACKUP - In addition to the natural backups that a modern synced photo collection creates, create periodic archives of your Original-sized photo collection. Time Machine works great, but adding another manual backup to a separate hard drive every month or two is even better.

4. ADEQUATE STORAGE SPACE - It’s no secret that much of the unintended photos deletion was the result of too little storage on iPhones and MacBook Airs/Pros. But it goes beyond just trying to squeeze too much stuff into too little space. Mobile and Mac devices need “unused” space to operate properly. Fortunately, iPhones now ship with a minimum of 256GB. A far cry from the days of 64GB. Without available room to borrow for temporary memory and processing everything can stall and crash, with the potential for file corruption. Always buy more storage than you think you’ll ever need. Plenty of iCloud storage helps too.

None of this is complicated, or difficult to fix. Your TV remote is worse. Really.

The big takeaway here is that every type of backup is effective for a specific type of risk. It’s not a one-size-fits all solution. Now that the iPhone has made lifelong photographers of us all, you owe it to yourself to understand how it all works, and to work it into your lifestyle.

You’ve got this.