I'll Take 5 Terabytes and a Side of Calm
A backup drive is the cheapest life insurance you'll ever buy.
Shortly after college our daughter came home from a party and announced she was going to India for a few months.
What?
A high school friend was pre-med and had volunteered at a small rural hospital there. Space for anyone who wanted to come. Help out at the school. Free room and board. See the world.
The conversation triggered our first-child-way-out-in-the-world-with-sketchy-internet-unknown-situation-all-alone-what-might-happen alarms. Yes, it was part of a non-profit group, but we aren’t talking Doctors or Builders Without Borders type support. It was flying solo, halfway around the globe, into a rural part of the world where we couldn’t help out if anything went south.
The issue, of course, was ours, not hers. She did fine. But to calm our anxiety we got her travel insurance for any medical emergency. Complete with airlift option. The surrogate backup for helicopter parents.
At least we slept better.
Photo collections are the polar opposite. They will always need nervous parent level protection. Without some proactive oversight, all those little pixels can get into trouble - damaged, mishandled, or lost.
The single most important step to prevent that is an active photo backup system. Keeping your pictures regularly copied to another device - computer, online storage, hard drive, etc. - is essential. So that the failure/loss/damage to one, doesn’t take all your photos and videos along with it.
With a backup of your collection, you can always get a new phone and restore those photos from your backup. Which is the whole idea. If your iPhone gets run over in the road or your iMac suffers a power spike, you’ve only lost one copy of your photos. Not the whole collection.
For my money, a portable hard drive, used properly, is the best place to start. It’s a physical device, dedicated to one thing - backing up your photos - either on their own or as part of your computer data.
At the time of writing, a 5TB hard drive goes for around $125. You can get 4TB for under $100. It’s the cheapest insurance you’ll ever buy. I like 5TB because it’s generally large enough to back up both a computer and one or two attached hard drives as well, with a little room to spare. But your mileage may vary. All you really care about is having enough storage that your backups don’t get stalled for lack of space.
There are 3 things to know about proper photo backups:
Make sure you are backing up Originals. Some photo management software like Apple Photos and Mylio Photos + offer to keep smaller preview sized images on your devices while the full-sized Originals are saved somewhere else. Either online or to a different device. If your computer has any sort of space saver turned on then the backup of that device won’t be saving the full-sized Original image.
Be sure your photos are synced across multiple devices. This is 2024. Creating multiple backup collections, whether they’re Previews or Originals is not only convenient but adds another layer of security against photo loss. At least one of those devices/locations should save Originals which can then be backed up to your nifty 5TB hard drive.
NEVER delete photos you want to keep. I know. That sounds dumb. But almost all out-of-the-box consumer backup systems are mirrored, which means that deleting pictures on your iPhone will also be deleting pictures every place else. On iCloud, Dropbox, Google Photos, your iMac, your iPad, and, in some cases, even a dedicated backup drive. Wherever that photo is connected. Unless you have set up a custom workflow, you should assume that whatever action you take will be mirrored everywhere your collection appears. Which makes unintended deletions the only wild card in the backup universe.
But the beauty of your external hard drive is that it can be used with Time Machine on the Mac or one of the 3rd party apps on Windows. Not only will they automatically back up your computer but they create a secure backup history in the process. Instead of updating the whole backup when photos are added or deleted, these special backups also record the changes made at the time they happened. So an accidental deletion or file corruption that happened today can be remedied by accessing your photo collection as it was yesterday. Or last week.
The ultimate ‘do over.’
So think of that hard drive as life insurance for your photo collection. Set it up and use it. You may never need it, but if you do, you’ll thank your lucky stars you have it.
And you’ll sleep better, too.
