Photos: how to make sure you never lose them

Photos are the files people grieve over. Everything else can be recreated — invoices reprinted, documents rewritten — but a decade of family pictures can't.

They're also the files most likely to be scattered across an old phone, a laptop, a memory card in a drawer and somebody's cloud account nobody can log into.

Why phone syncing isn't a backup

iCloud Photos and Google Photos mirror your phone. That's useful, but a mirror copies mistakes as faithfully as it copies photos: delete an album on the phone and it disappears from the cloud too, usually within 30 or 60 days of sitting in a recently-deleted folder.

A backup is a separate copy that isn't changed when the original is. Sync plus one real backup is the combination that works.

A setup that survives the realistic disasters

Think about the things that actually happen: a lost phone, a dead laptop, a deleted folder, a burst pipe.

One working copy, on the phone or computer you use
One automatic off-site copy through a backup service, not just sync
One local copy on an external drive, kept unplugged when not in use
Every few years, copy the archive onto newer media — old drives and DVDs don't last forever

Rescuing photos from old devices

Most people have pictures stranded somewhere. It's worth an evening.

Old phones in a drawer — charge them, connect to a computer and copy the DCIM folder across
Memory cards and camera cards — copy them off before the card fails; they aren't long-term storage
An old laptop that won't start — the drive can usually be read even when the machine can't boot
Scanned prints and slides — treat them as irreplaceable and back them up first, since there's no original file anywhere else

Keeping them findable

Thirty thousand photos with no order is only slightly better than none. You don't need a system as much as a habit: folders by year, then by event, and a few minutes now and then deleting the obvious duplicates and blurred shots.

Photo apps that recognise faces and places do most of the work now — the thing they can't do is include pictures that were never brought in from the old phone.

Print the ones you'd miss most

Not a technical point, but a true one. Every format eventually becomes awkward to read; a photo book on a shelf doesn't need a password, a drive or a working laptop. A modest print run of the best few dozen each year is the most reliable backup there is.