How to back up family photos (so you never lose them)

Every year, parents lose irreplaceable photos to a phone in a swimming pool, a failed hard drive, or a cloud subscription that lapsed quietly. Backing up family photos properly is neither hard nor expensive — it just needs a system.

The 3-2-1 rule, translated for parents

3 copies of every photo, on 2 different types of storage, with 1 copy away from your house. In practice for most families:

• Copy 1: the phone itself
• Copy 2: automatic cloud backup (iCloud Photos or Google Photos)
• Copy 3: a yearly export to a hard drive kept at a grandparent's house — or, more realistically for many, a second cloud service

The subscription trap

Cloud backup is only backup while you pay. If iCloud lapses, Apple keeps photos accessible for a grace period, then they're gone. Set the payment on a card that doesn't expire soon and put a yearly "export the photos" reminder in your calendar — every January, download the previous year to a drive.

Print is a backup too

No format has proven more durable than paper: a printed photo book of the year's best survives every password reset, format change and company shutdown. It backs up the 80 photos that matter most, which is a different job to backing up all 8,000 — do both.

What about the context?

Backups preserve pixels, not stories. The caption, the place, what she said at the top of the hill — none of that lives in a JPEG. A memory app that logs stories alongside photos (and keeps them on your device rather than a company server) preserves the part of the memory a backup can't. More on this in how to preserve family memories.