How should I backup photos and other files from my smartphone

How should I backup photos and other files from my smartphone?

Short answer:
I would recommend saving your data from your smartphone in at least 2 different places. Storing it in a cloud storage, while is pretty secure and reliable, it is not guaranteed.

Long answer:

My short answer recommendation was to store copies in 2 different places. While that does sound paranoid – it is usually free with very little hassle to ensure timeless and priceless pictures are not lost in time forever.
No amount of money can recover photos from a lost or stolen phone.

Keeping a copy on your computer (laptop or desktop) is definatly a good place to store a copy. However, you should keep in mind that hard drives have been known to fail unexpectily.
On iOS you have iTunes so the process can be automated but Android would require manual copying and pasting of files which may become tedious and it’s an easy habbit to break out of.
In the tech industry we have a saying “Automation is king”. In other words you want to strive for a process or service that runs in the background and just works.

I am unfamiliar with the offerings of iOS but I’m sure it has something similar for iCloud for automatic syncing of photos to iCloud. On Android the built in Photos will connect to your google drive and offer to automatically backup any pictures.
Other applications such as dropbox also offer an automatic backup functionality. These services do come with a small finiite amount of storage, however, for most people it would be more than enough to store a copy
of their photos and other information.

Bio
Latest Posts

Natalie Adams

Owner/Technical Lead at Allos Technologies, LLC

I have worked on a wide range of projects including personal and contributed to several open source projects. I know many languages including C#, C++, PHP, SQL. Published author (Operating System Algorithms). I work with both Windows and Linux on a day to day basis.