What is the gold standard for backing up photos?

[Lacoutine]

We have thousands of photos from the DC’s childhoods and have recently managed to retrieve them from a hard drive that had been “lost”. The sense of relief is huge but of course now we want to absolutely make sure we never risk losing them again. I’m not techy but my husband is, so I can hand any suggestions over to him.

Obviously we have our computer backed up in the usual way, but my DH wants to have three methods of back up - to the cloud and to a separate hard drive as well. Any recommendations? I feel we’ve been given a second chance 😬

What make is your computer and phone?

I’m aiming for hard drive google and prints from freeprints. Finding the time is the barrier!

Sorry - completely forgot I’d posted this… We’re on iPhones and PC - photos are on the PC as lots of them date from before we had smart phones (hence the panic when we thought we’d lost them!).

I’ve printed off some of my favourites into a bonusprint album. They look great. You can get about 250 photos into an album for about £50 (loads of vouchers). I thought I was changing job and have 10k photos on work phone which galvanised me.

At least three places is the only way to be safe.
1 Local
2 Local backup HDD (USB one or another computer in the house)
3 Internet backup - cloud service. Note that I don't count iCloud Photo Library or Google Photos as a real backup because if you delete a pic it goes away.

What I actually do:
All pics are all in iCloud Photo Library and Google Photos. This is done automatically at the phone side for new pics. Two cloud copies, plus the local copy on the phone.

I have a computer that can also see the cloud photo libraries. Actually two laptops, his'n'hers :) They both also get backed up to a local USB HDD plugged into the router using Apple's Time Machine and Windows' Windows Backup, automatically. So that's three local copies.

The laptops also both have Backblaze cloud backup accounts. This takes a copy of whatever you want from the computer and puts it into their datacentre (encrypted from your side) all automatically and continuously whenever the laptops are awake and online. Two more cloud backup copies.

Seven copies of varying levels of stability+permanence. Should be okay.

If you're using an iPhone, then I would use Apple iCloud, they charge for the storage the rates are reasonable, I pay £3 a month for 200GB.You're probably using the free storage already, so there's not much to set up.
As it's native it integrates with all of the applications.

On the windows PC, use iPhotos for windows.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108994

(FYI Photos on MacOS has a lot more features)
You can also access (and down / upload) via the website at iCloud.com, if you sign in now you will see your phone photo's if the Photos application is using to iCloud.
If you can also share albums and let people upload and comment if you wish.
Images will then synchronise across all the devices signed in to the same Apple ID.

So you will need to consider who is looking after the existing photos,

Whenever you take a photo on your phone it will copy to iCloud and the PC, if you delete an image on the PC it will be removed from the phone and visa versa, which keeps things organised.

It does of course means that of someone had access to your account, they could also delete the images. So never share your credentials or devices.

(For example, you have a "family iPad" synchronised to your account, and little Jonny deletes thousands of images to make space to install a game, without realising the device is synchronised to your account)

I love the ability to keep everything organised, and share albums dynamically.

I used to additionally back up to a local hard drive with Time Machine, but now I just copy the entire library to a RAID NAS on my network every year. (never needed it).

Icloud, computer hard drive and hard disk drive here.

Thanks everyone - I’ll pass this on to DH who looks after this end of things. So relieved to have them back!

@HerNameIsIncontinentiaButtocks Can I pay for your services??

@Lacoutine

im so pleased for you that you've got them back 💕

Amazon prime provides unlimited photo backups/storage. Even if you cancel prime you can still access your backups.

Always make a back up of your back up and one backup should be a dvd which has no moving parts and nothing to break unless someone scratches it.

I lost a lot of photos when the cloud service I used was hacked and I've lost photos from a hard disk as the hard disk broke.

I've never, yet, lost any photos I've backed up to dvd.

Placemarking as I need to do this!