Best way to back up 12,000 photos and videos?

[januaryblues46]

I have an oldish iPhone containing around 12,000 photos and videos, many of which are very precious showing family holidays, the DC growing up and suchlike.

I’m feeling increasingly paranoid about losing them especially after nearly dropping my phone down the loo today and was wondering how best to back them all up just in case?

Are they all backed up automatically on my laptop via iTunes when I plug my phone into that? It says my phone is backing up but I can’t find the physical photos on my laptop anywhere, so it’s not very reassuring.

If not, could something like iCloud or Dropbox be a good option?

I’m not tech savvy so if anyone could shed any light I’d be very grateful!

Personally I’d just copy them to a couple of different drives/usb sticks and leave it at that. Storage is cheap these days. A 16gb stick is barely more than the price of a cup of coffee.

I’m still backing up - started over three hours ago and it’s only about halfway there! We have pretty fast internet as well. I guess there’s just such a huge amount of data, it’s going to take a while.

Oh yes....i would also buy a couple of smaller USB sticks so they're completely separate....

So if zombie apocalypse happens you'd still have pics when in the bunker!

Google's (free) limit is 15GB which includes email and other services. There's nothing to stop you opening a second Google account just for your photos though.

I'd strongly recommend having at least two backups - more is better. Get a least one on a hard drive or USB stick at home, and then have a cloud backup service too.

Unfortunately free cloud services and good cloud services tend not to be one and the same thing. Expect to pay if you want to store more than a few gigabytes.

The old advice that "data you only have one copy of is data you don't care about" is true. Especially given how cheap USB storage is now. You can get a terabyte (1000 gigabyte) USB hard drive for £40, that's the reputable brands too.

I pay £1.99 for a gazillion GBs of Google storage. My photos and videos automatically get backed up there. I can also choose whether I want to delete the image from just my phone or Google Photos as well.

Easy peasy. Much less faff than USB drives or external hard drives. Just keep your email (and back-up access) secure.

One final question everyone - can you find out how many photos you have stored on the Google app? I want to check it tallies with the total on my iPhone but can’t see how!

Also it seems that if I delete a photo from my iPhone, it doesn’t delete from Google. I have to go into the Google Photos app and delete it again from there, which is a bit of a pain.

Everything suggested above is good but personally I would get them printed and put into albums (the most precious ones at least if you don't want to do them all).