How to back up family photos for good

Most families have their entire photo history on two or three phones and one aging laptop. It feels safe because the photos are "in the cloud." Then a phone gets dropped in a lake, an account gets locked, or someone deletes a shared album to free space, and fifteen years of birthdays turn out to have lived in exactly one place.

The 3-2-1 rule, family edition

Photographers have used this rule for two decades, and security agencies still point to it as the baseline:

• 3 copies of every photo (the original plus two backups).
• 2 different kinds of storage, such as a cloud service and an external drive.
• 1 copy somewhere else, outside your home, so a fire or burglary can't take everything.

For a family, that usually looks like this:

1. Copy one: the photos on your phones, synced to a cloud photo library.
2. Copy two: an external hard drive or SSD at home, updated from a computer every few months.
3. Copy three: a second drive kept at a relative's house or in a desk at work, swapped once or twice a year. A second cloud service also counts.

If your photos exist in only one place, you don't have a backup, you have a photo collection waiting for a bad day.

Shared albums and sync are not backups

This is the mistake that catches most families.

• Sync mirrors deletions. Delete a photo on your phone and the synced library usually deletes it everywhere. Trash folders give you a window (30 days in Apple's Recently Deleted, up to 60 for backed-up items in Google's), then it's gone.
• Shared albums are often compressed. They're great for grandparents to see new pictures, but the copies can be lower quality than your originals.
• One account is one point of failure. If the person who owns the family account loses access, everyone does.

Use shared albums for sharing. Use real copies, at full quality, for keeping.

Scan the old prints before they fade

Boxes of prints and negatives are the most fragile part of most family archives.

• Sort first. Pull the best 200 rather than scanning 2,000 blurry duplicates. Ask an older relative to sit with you and name people and places while you sort.
• Use what you have. A flatbed scanner at 600 dpi is ideal for small prints. A phone scanning app works well for quick batches; shoot in even daylight, flat on a table, with no glare.
• Write the names down. Put who, where and roughly when in the file name or caption, like 1987-diwali-nani-house.jpg. Twenty years from now, the names are worth as much as the image.
• Consider a scanning service for large collections or negatives, and keep the originals afterward.

If you're also helping a parent with their own phone, our guide to setting up a phone for an aging parent covers turning on photo sync for them.

A 20-minute yearly check

Pick a fixed date, like New Year's Day or a family birthday, and run through this:

1. Open a few random photos from each copy. A drive that won't mount is a drive you need to replace now, not later.
2. Copy the year's new photos to both drives.
3. Check cloud storage. Is the plan close to full? Did sync quietly stop on anyone's phone?
4. Confirm access. Make sure two people in the family know how to sign in to the main account.
5. Swap the off-site drive.

Twenty minutes a year is cheap insurance for the pictures you'd grab first in a fire. Set the reminder before you close this tab.