Storing photos and videos in the cloud

[Rainatnight]

I have several million photos and videos of DD on my phone, which is now breaking down as a result.

What do you adopters do about storing these? iCloud is the obvious candidate but I don't know if that has privacy risks?

Thanks

[fatberg]

It’s probably as secure as you’re going to get tbh.

Security risks are most likely to come from you falling for a phishing attack - the service itself should be fine. (And it’d be all over the news if it wasn’t.)

[Rainatnight]

I'm sure you're right. Haven't there been incidents with, say, Jennifer Lawrence's naked photos being leaked from iCloud? Not that we're famous (obviously) but it makes me wonder.

[fatberg]

That was someone using her password I think.

[Rainatnight]

Ah, got you. Super. I really want to back up properly as I'd be devastated if we lost all these pics.

[FoldedAndUnfoldedAndUnfolding]

Just to throw another option into the mix - I have a 1tb portable harddrive which I backup all my photos to. (Actually, because I'm paranoid, I have two drives - one lives at my parents' house in case of fire ).

I just physically connect my harddrives to my laptop via usb once a month and run a backup. It's very quick. My DF, who is far more tech-savvy than me, has kindly set up a "NAS" drive for me which would allow me to run my backups wirelessly overnight - if I knew how to use it

The drives are very cheap for huge amounts of storage. My concern with the cloud is less about security and more I just feel less in control of my photos if I'm relying on an external faceless company to look after them. It's still better than nothing though - photos are so precious!

[Rainatnight]

Thanks, Folded. Do you have to get them off your phone and onto your laptop first?

[FoldedAndUnfoldedAndUnfolding]

Good point. I backup my iphone to my laptop regularly through itunes anyway. I also save to my laptop photos which DD's DF sends me, and photos from my camera, etc. I then organise my photos into albums on my laptop (months / trips / special celebrations / etc). So it's the collated organised photos I backup to my passport drive.

If you don't do all that (which sounds like a massive faff when I write it all out!) I think in itunes when you backup your phone to your laptop you can choose to back it up to any external drive connected to your laptop (rather than the laptop itself). So you could achieve the backup in one step, simply by syncing your phone to the drive through the laptop.

[RicottaPancakes]

"The cloud" is not as safe as it can get. As other people have said, storing them yourself is much much safer (in terms of other people getting hold of them).