Backing Up Your Photographs

 Introduction

The photographs we take contain many memories and many, if not all, of those memories are irreplaceable, even if we were able to revisit the place they were taken.  People change, places change, and the times and seasons are also likely to have changed.  Therefore it is important that we back up those memories so we can retain them if, for example, we lose our phone or it fails and has to be replaced.

I have just had to recover some of my photographs after a "housekeeping" mistake on my computer so thought I would describe the set up I use.

My needs are quite complex because I use cameras and an iPhone and do a lot of editing and cataloguing on my desktop computer.  You probably do not need to follow what I am doing but you do need something, see the Minimum Solution at the bottom of this post.

My Equipment

I currently take photographs with 2 SLR (Canon EOS 7D, EOS 90D) cameras and my iPhone 13 Pro.  The 2 cameras use 2 different sizes of removable memory card and the iPhone stores photos on the phone.   I use an Apple Mac desktop computer as my master store to bring all my photographs together in one place filed in folders organised by date.  I edit and manage all my images on my PC using Adobe Lightroom Classic, part of a paid for (£9.98 per month)suite of programmes from Adobe.

Apple Photos viewed on iMac

My iPhone contains photographs dating back to 2011 and, during this time, I have "culled" a lot of images in order to fit them all in as I have taken new images.  Fortunately each new phone over the years has come with increased storage capacity.

I do not use camera memory cards for long term storage as I do not think they are reliable enough.  I usually delete all images from the cards once I have successfully transferred them to my PC and backed them up.

First Line back up

My iPhone synchronises every image I take with iCloud so my photographs are automatically copied onto the "Cloud" and are available on my PC (because it is an Apple Mac and shares the same iCloud account.  While this is a good first line of defence, it is not a true back up as any changes you make on the iPhone are copied to the Cloud.  So if you mistakenly delete an image on your phone it is also deleted from the Cloud, though you do have 30 days grace when you can recover deleted photographs.

I transfer photos from my cameras onto my PC by physically inserting my memory cards into a card reader attached to my PC.  I use Adobe Lightroom to copy and catalogue the images from those cards.

2nd Line

My second line of defence uses the Adobe Lightroom CC app (Free) on my iPhone.  This is similar to iCloud in that it copies the photos onto the Cloud but instead of syncing to iCloud it syncs directly to Adobe's cloud storage and from there to the Lightroom Classic database on my PC.  I automatically receive a copy of every image I take with my iPhone on my PC hard drive.  

Adobe Lightroom om iMac

This is a true backup as deletions on my iPhone are not automatically deleted from my hard drive!  Similarly edits I make on the iPhone are also not automatically copied across to my computer; not a problem for me as I do all my editing on the PC.

Alternatively, you can use the free Google Photos app to achieve the same thing if you are not using Lightroom Classic.  Both Lightroom and Google Photos apps include additional photo editing tools and will copy your phots onto the Cloud from where they can be downloaded to a computer.

All my iPhone and camera photos, edits and cataloguing data are now stored on the hard drive of my computer and are being managed in Adobe Lightroom Classic.  But what if that computer hard drive fails;  I would still have most of my iPhone original images on the iPhone and in the Cloud but I will have lost all my edits, cataloguing information and all my camera photographs.  So I need a third line of defence.

3rd Line

My third line of defence is to copy files onto removable hard drives attached to my computer.  I have two 2 Terabyte SSD hard drives attached to my computer and use Apple's "Time Machine" application to back up my Lightroom catalogue to 1 drive and the original images to the 2nd every hour.

So after 1 hour all my photographs, edits and cataloguing information exist in 2 places.  But I still cannot relax as physically those 2 locations are both on my desk.  What if the apartment burned down or a thief stole my computer and everything attached to it.  I would still lose every image except the iPhone originals stored on the phone and in the Cloud.  So I need yet another line of defence to store my images in a different location.

4th Line

The easiest way to do this and avoid physically moving discs around is to use Cloud storage.  I use:

• Dropbox Backup

  

  Dropbox Backup accessed through web browser

  
  for all my images, and
• iCloud for my Lightroom Catalog (because it is stored in my Documents folder and that is already being backed up to iCloud)

You can also use Google Drive.  

The Minimum

The solution I have described above probably exceeds your needs but we all need to do something.

If you only use a single phone for photography and do minimal editing then you may just need cloud storage.

Ask yourself "What will happen to my photos if I lose my phone or it breaks?"  If the answer is that you will lose everything consider backing up automatically to iCloud, Google Photos, or DropBox.  Depending how many images you have you may have to pay 1 or 2 pounds a month for increased storage capacity.