Where to back up your smartphone photos

Photographs are among our most precious possessions, with research showing that if our home was on fire, the majority of us would grab photo albums and photographs before dashing out the door.

Yet in today’s digital age, many of our favorite photos are not stored in albums but on our smartphones and computers. But if something were to happen to your hard drive or your data, you could lose some of your most priceless memories. This happened to users of Adobe’s Lightroom in August after an app update wiped out data including both user presets and photos.

“Did anyone else lose all your @Adobe @Lightroom photos and presets with their last update?!” wrote @llambert89 on Twitter. “This is literally the worst. I lost 800 pictures and all my paid presets (which were worth hundreds of dollars.)”

If you have beloved photos on social media and think they’re safe there, you should be aware that these images won’t have the same quality of the originals. Facebook and other social media sites will compress your pictures and decrease the integrity of the photographs. Terry Sullivan of the New York Times explains that you need to carefully choose how you store your images online because not all sites are created equal.

“But right now, most websites, including social media and even photo-printing sites, aren’t designed to truly store photos … when you back up your photos, you want to be able to retrieve an image file that is as close to, if not identical to, the original photo you captured on your phone or digital camera,” writes Sullivan. “That’s also why you want to carefully choose a backup solution, whether it’s online or an external hard drive.”

Back Up Your Photos In Multiple Places

To avoid a catastrophic loss, store your photos in more than one way. That can mean using network-attached storage (NAS) or an external hard drive in addition to a cloud service, or using multiple cloud services. Whatever you choose, it’s a good idea to use a system that automatically updates in the background so you don’t have to think about it.

So what are your best options for backing up images online? Cloud services such as Apple’s iCloud are just the start. Amazon Prime members can store photos and videos on Amazon for free, but only up to a point. Prime members get complimentary 5 GB storage, but if you need more storage, you can upgrade to a plan that gives you 100 GB for $1.99 a month.

Not a Prime member? Look into Google photos where you can get 100 GB of storage for $1.99 a month or 200 GB for $2.99 a month. Dropbox is another option, offering 2 GB free storage to users. After that, you will have to pay to upgrade for either 1 TB or 2 TB of storage ($9.99 per month for 1 TB).

Though some experts also advise saving photos on a NAS Box or an external hard drive, although others say you need two external hard drives, so you can back up your backup!

When it comes to protecting your most beloved moments with family and friends, you can never be too careful.