How NOT to Back Up Your Photos (And Learn What Regret Looks Like in 4K)

You don’t notice your photo library until it’s gone. One day it’s 38,742 slightly different shots of your dog blinking, and the next day it’s an empty folder named Recovered Items containing exactly one corrupted thumbnail of your elbow.

If you’d like to achieve that particular flavor of despair, follow this guide. If you’d like to avoid it, do the opposite of everything below. Either way, you’ll learn something. Probably.

Step 1: Believe the cloud is a magical place where nothing ever fails

The first rule of not backing up your photos is to outsource your thinking to a marketing slogan. Pick any service that says “Your memories, safe forever” and interpret “forever” as a legally binding oath made under moonlight.

How to do it wrong

• Assume syncing = backup. If your phone deletes a photo, you want that deletion to instantly propagate everywhere. Efficiency!
• Never verify what’s actually uploaded. Trust the comforting progress bar. It wouldn’t lie.
• Ignore storage limits and “optimize” settings. When a service offers to replace your original photos with “high quality,” say yes without reading. You’re a minimalist now.

What to do instead (boring but effective)

• Use at least two copies in two different places. Cloud can be one of them, but not your whole personality.
• Check counts occasionally. If you have 10,000 photos locally and 7,000 in the cloud, the missing 3,000 are not “vibes.”

Step 2: Keep everything on one device, preferably the one you drop the most

Your phone is the perfect single point of failure. It travels with you, meets water regularly, and has a battery you pretend isn’t swelling. For a truly committed approach, store photos only on your phone and treat every warning dialog as a personal challenge.

How to do it wrong

• Never move photos off the phone. That’s “manual work,” and you’re here to automate disappointment.
• When your phone says it’s out of storage, delete things at random. Start with “DCIM,” because it looks suspicious.
• Delay updates forever. Bugs are just features you haven’t emotionally processed yet.

What to do instead

• Make a monthly export. Plug in a cable, copy your photos to a computer or external drive. Yes, like it’s 2009. It still works.
• Use an app that can export originals (not just “share” them), and keep the folder structure intact.

Step 3: Use one external drive, and treat it like a family heirloom

External drives are great because they fail quietly, often without warning, and always at the worst possible moment. For maximum heartbreak, buy exactly one drive, put all your photos on it, and store it next to your laptop in the same bag. That way, one theft covers everything. Bundling!

How to do it wrong

• Buy the cheapest drive with a brand name you’ve never heard pronounced out loud.
• Never eject it properly. Unplugging it mid-transfer adds suspense to your life.
• Don’t label anything. Call the folder “New Folder (7)” and keep it spicy.

What to do instead

• Use two drives and rotate them. Keep one at home and one somewhere else (work, a relative’s house). If that sounds dramatic, wait until you lose everything.
• Prefer SSDs for travel. They handle bumps better than spinning drives. Not immortal. Just less fragile.
• Use clear naming: Photos_2017-2020, Phone_Exports_2026-02, etc.

Step 4: Confuse “sync” with “archive” and “archive” with “forever”

Many photo apps will “free up space” by removing local files after upload. This is fine until you realize you can’t download originals easily, or the service downgraded quality, or you lose account access and the only support option is “Have you tried being logged in?”

How to do it wrong

• Enable every space-saving toggle. You love living on the edge of a missing original.
• Store everything inside an app that refuses to export in bulk unless you pay or wait 48 hours.
• Forget your password, lose your recovery email, and treat SIM swaps as a “rare event.”

What to do instead

• Keep an offline archive (drive or computer) that contains the originals in normal folders.
• Maintain account hygiene: password manager + recovery email + 2FA with backup codes printed or stored offline.

Step 5: Never test a restore (because that would be responsible)

A backup you haven’t restored is just a belief system. It might work. It might be full of corrupted files. It might be an empty folder you’ve been lovingly syncing for years.

How to do it wrong

• Assume the backup is fine because “it’s been running.” So is a car with no oil, for a while.
• Only discover problems after disaster. Preferably during a family reunion when someone asks for “that photo from 2018.”

What to do instead

• Quarterly restore test: pick 20 random photos (old + new) and restore them to a different device. Confirm they open.
• Spot-check metadata: dates, filenames, Live Photos / HEIC conversions, etc. Some tools ‘helpfully’ break these.

A simple backup plan that doesn’t hate you

If you want a plan that’s not an engineering project, use the classic 3-2-1 rule:

• 3 copies of your photos
• 2 different media (phone/computer + external drive, for example)
• 1 offsite (cloud or a drive stored elsewhere)

Example setup (practical, not heroic)

1. Primary: your phone + a photo app for daily convenience.
2. Local backup: monthly export to your computer, which is backed up to an external drive (Time Machine, Windows File History, or a simple copy).
3. Offsite backup: cloud storage or a second drive rotated offsite.

Final thoughts (before you learn the hard way)

Your photos aren’t just files. They’re receipts of your life: trips you barely remember, friends who changed cities, babies who somehow became toddlers overnight. Backing them up is not a productivity hack. It’s basic hygiene.

So yes, keep using the cloud. Just don’t let it be the only place your memories exist. The cloud is convenient. Regret is also convenient—it shows up instantly.