Credit: Gavin Phillips / MakeUseOf

Every photo tells a story — a birthday, a holiday, a once-in-a-lifetime trip, or maybe the last picture you took with someone special. Now imagine all those moments gone in seconds.

Like most people, I have hundreds of gigabytes of photos and videos, such is the ease of snapping precious moments with modern smartphones. It’s undeniably simple to capture any magical moment, but how about backing them up and taking care of them for the future?

Previously, we’d print photos out and place them lovingly in photobooks; some of us still do. For most of us, our photos and videos live on hard drives or in the cloud, waiting for us to stumble back upon them someday. However, in both cases, even a small mistake can wipe out everything—but it doesn’t have to be that way.

One backup isn’t enough

Follow the 3-2-1 rule

Credit: Gavin Phillips / MakeUseOf

Uploading your photos to Google Photos, iCloud, or Amazon Photos is a great start — but it’s still only one copy. And one copy is never enough.

If your account gets locked, hacked, or deleted, those memories vanish. Cloud providers also occasionally make changes that catch people out. Remember when Google Photos ended its free unlimited storage? Thousands of users suddenly found their backups at risk or incomplete.

Your best bet is to follow the tried and tested 3-2-1 backup rule: three copies of your data, stored on two different types of media, with one copy kept offsite. For example:

• Your computer holds your main photo library
• An external drive holds a backup copy
• You also use a cloud storage service to back that up

If one fails, you have others to keep your photos and videos safe.

Keeping all the backups in one place

Don’t keep all of your drives in one cupboard

Credit: Gavin Phillips / MakeUseOf

Following on from the above, it’s also important to make sure that you keep your backups in separate places. It’s all very well and good having multiple copies, but if you keep all of your backups in the same drawer and something happens, they’re all gone in an instant.

At the very least, make sure you have an offsite backup, be that physical media at someone else’s house, or a comprehensive cloud backup option. You don’t need to go overboard — just ensure one copy exists somewhere that isn’t affected if disaster strikes locally.

Furthermore, the 2025 global AWS outage was a poignant reminder of why having your data in more than one place is ultra-important, especially when it comes to those one-off images you never want to lose.

You haven’t checked if your backup still works

Does your external drive still work?

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I must admit that this has happened to me. Over the years, as my laptops have given up the ghost, I’d pull the hard drive from them and not think much of it. I had a stack of around five or six old HDDs on my bookshelf, waiting for me to check them and move the data.

Well, when I finally got my act together and checked them, guess what? One of them wouldn’t load, and I’m fairly certain its the one with a load of photos of the kids on. So, yeah, I wasn’t flavor of the month (in fact, flavor of the year... it’s ongoing, but there are ways to recover data from an old hard drive).

So, in short, verify that your backups are still working, and do it often. That means checking your external drives are still accessible, making sure you have the correct login information for your email accounts and recovery services, and so on.

You could also try a free drive health checker app to see if your hard drive is about to fail.

Photo dumps lost to time

Keeping organized is a backup feature to master

Credit: Yadullah Abidi / MakeUseOf

Wow, yet another photo backup I’ve experienced more than once. I feel certain that most folks have also done this, but it’s frustrating to fix once you’ve made the error in the first place.

And that is, the moment before you leave for a trip, realize you have no storage left on your smartphone or SD card, and arbitrarily throw all of the photos into a single, enormous folder. It’s a giant mish-mash that can sometimes cover years of photos and videos, and while you’ve technically backed up your files, you’re not going to ever find them again because the folder is grim and hard to navigate.

So, on the one hand, your photos are fine. On the other hand, the lack of organization means you may never actually look at them again. Use a photo management tool like DigiKam to sort out your incoming snaps, and you’ll never lose any again.

Ignoring account changes

Lost email address, password changes, and data breaches can all cost you

Cloud services are a core part of any photo backup strategy. I mostly use Google Photos as I frequently change my smartphone, and it works without skipping a beat. Back in 2021, Google actually revealed its compression algorithm could be damaging your images more than you realize, but for me, the service works near-perfectly.

But online accounts aren’t sacred. They have a finite lifespan, especially if the company decides to do some cleaning up. In 2024, Google wiped a whole host of inactive accounts, including Google Photos accounts, to tidy up its service. With it, millions of photos were permanently deleted, never to be seen again.

The wider point is that you need to log into your backup accounts and keep an eye out for any changes. Service providers do occasionally change (or change their systems, etc.), and it’s on you to watch your inbox for those moments. Oh, and don’t forget family or shared accounts—they need attention, too.

Don’t wait around for your photos to disappear

Build a proper photo backup plan now

Your photos are your personal history. It’s hard to imagine losing photos that capture your entire life, but it happens. All it takes is one accident, one corrupted drive, or one forgotten password to erase years of your life. So, take a moment to put some proper photo backup processes in place.

1. Follow the 3-2-1 rule. Three copies, two formats, one offsite.
2. Automate. Tools like Syncthing, FreeFileSync, or built-in macOS/Windows backup utilities make this easy.
3. Verify quarterly. Open random photos and test drives or uploads.
4. Keep one encrypted copy offsite. It could be in the cloud or on a drive you store elsewhere.
5. Refresh every few years. Replace aging drives and recheck your cloud settings.

Take an hour to check your backups this week. It’s the simplest and most important thing you can do to ensure your memories last forever.