Backups - Important Notice to Apple Device Photographers (and others)

If you store all your photos on your phone, tablet or camera memory card you risk losing all your photos if you lose it or if they fail or get damaged.  Memory cards, in particular used to be notoriously unreliable; they may have improved but I do not trust them.

Serious photographers usually rely on 3 levels of data storage:

• Their working copies - computer hard drive
• Immediate backups - removable hard drive
• Off site - usually cloud based but could be a hard drive that you move about.

The hardest part of the backup process is getting the phots off the camera/memory card in the first place.

If you are not paying for online storage of some or all of your photographs your back up system is unlikely to be effective because of low data storage limits.

Mobile device users have several options for initiating their backups:

• Google Photos
• iCloud Photos, apple users only and may be affected by recent changes
• Dropbox or other cloud-based system
• Wifi or wired transfer to their computer

These cloud based systems have low free data storage limits:

• Google - 15 GB
• Apple/iCloud - 5 GB
• DropBox - 2GB

Recent Changes affecting Apple Users

Apple has changed the way they synchronise photographs between different Apple devices.  If you use both an iPhone and iPad you may have noticed your photos stopped synchronising sometime in July.  This is because Apple have switched off their original synchronising service, "My Photo Stream".

You were probably not aware that Apple has had 2 different ways to synchronise your photographs. 

• My Photo Stream was the original method that dats back to 2011.  It was completely free and had no data limit.
• iCloud Photos is the newer (and now the replacement) system.  It uses your iCloud Drive and charges for storage after 5GB of total space is used.  You are unlikely to stay below the free storage limit if you have a lot of photographs.   The charges are not huge, 50GB for £0.99 per month, 200GB for £2.99 per month.

You may already be using the iCloud Photos method; in which case you will not notice any difference and need not do anything.  If, however, you have noticed your photos no longer synch between devices you need to change your settings to use the iCloud:

1. Settings
2. Apple ID
3. iCloud
4. Turn Photos On

The advantages of using iCloud rre:

• It is true backup as it stores copies of your photos "on the cloud".  "My Photo Stream" did not store your photos it only made sure all devices had the same photos.  
• It can store low resolution versions on your phone and full resolution versions on the cloud; useful if you have limited storage on your phone.

The disadvantage is that it is a paid for service after 5GB storage.  This is quite a low threshold, my iPhone library (full sized versions) is currently 28GB.  I have had to upgrade to the 200GB plan as I also have documents on iCloud that I want to synchronise between my iPhone, iPad and Mac desktop.

Google Photos as An Alternative to Apple iCloud

You may wish to consider using Google Photos as an alternative as their free storage limit is 15GB.  Their upgrade plans are:

• 100 GB - £1.59 per month (I use this one as my Google Photos library is currently 16.96GB)
• 200 GB - £2.49 per month
• 2TB - £7.99 per month.
• 5TB - £19.99/month

Recommendation

Your photo library is at risk if you do not have an effective back up system..  It is likely that you will need a minimum of 100 GB storage for safety so expect to pay around £2 to £3 per month.