People don't think much about backing up the data on their phone until they lose it all.
It happened to me just a few weeks ago. My nearly 5-year-old iPhone 6S died. The phone was going slow, so I restarted it and got caught on the never-ending white Apple logo. I had no intention of upgrading. The iPhone 6S was a perfect phone —the last iPhone with a headphone jack and that sweet $200 subsidy pricing.
Unfortunately, because the phone was so old, the battery wasn’t the greatest, which meant I was constantly using low power mode. This means my phone wasn’t always backing up. And while I did semi-regularly take off all those adorable pictures of my two children, there was still a chunk of data lost with the death of my iPhone.
Many years ago, I learned a similar lesson with my MacBook. Lesson learned now with my iPhone too, because this won’t happen again. I’ve signed up for a number of different backup and storage services that will be regularly used with my new iPhone.
Here they are, so hopefully this never happens to you too.
Google Photos
Google Photos is easily the best of the free photo and video storage services. Just install the app on your phone, connect it to your Google account, and you have an absolutely free unlimited photos and videos backup solution as long as you don’t mind Google saving them in a slightly lesser quality than the original images. And, as long as you aren’t in lower power mode, it works quietly in the background, constantly backing up pictures from your phone.
Unlike many other photo backup services, Google Photos even saves the Live Photo version of your pics! It has other cute bonus features like photo albums and automatically curates your “memories.” But really, I don’t care about those things. Just backup my photos and videos so I don’t ever lose a thing in a worst case scenario.
Google Photos, being free and all, should 100% be a part of your iPhone backup plan.
Amazon Photos
Are you an Amazon Prime subscriber? If so, you should be backing up your pictures on Amazon Photos! The app works similarly to the Google Photos app. It has similar organizing features and an auto-upload option. One awesome feature with Amazon Photos is that the main user can invite five other family members to set up their own unlimited account too. Another great thing is that Amazon saves the original resolution of the image too. That’s a big plus over Google Photos for Amazon.
However, also unlike Google’s service, Amazon requires a separate Amazon Drive subscription in order to backup your videos. That’s a big minus for Amazon. If I’m worried about making sure all the media on my phone is safe, life is simpler with Google Photos knowing that it’s all there.
If you already have an Amazon Prime account, you should absolutely be using Amazon Photos to backup all your pictures. It would be silly to not take advantage and make sure you photos are doubly protected!
iCloud
I’ll be honest, I’ve had not great experiences with iCloud. I’ve had photos that I thought were on iCloud...in fact, not be saved there.For the life of me, I don’t understand why Apple has made it so confusing. For example, why create two photo products under the iCloud banner with iCloud photos and My Photo Stream? (Luckily, Apple seems to have realized this is an unnecessary issue and appears to be phasing out My Photo Stream.)
However, I now truly understand the power of the ultimate iCloud feature: the actual phone backup in the cloud. I cannot stress how easy it was to get most of my data straight to my new phone, some stuff which I thought I lost. I have since upgraded to a paid $2.99 iCloud subscription which gives me 200GB. I’ll use other services to specifically backup my photos and videos library, but iCloud is there to restore my phone so I don’t miss a step if this one dies on me or gets lost or stolen.
Dropbox / Koofr
Dropbox is a great file syncing solution. You probably already use it at work to collaborate with your coworkers! But, you could easily use it to backup your iPhone media on the spot too. The mobile app is really easy to use as well. While the free version is quite limited storage-wise, $9.99 for 2TB is a pretty good deal! If Dropbox was able to automatically create and storage iPhone backups, I might even use it over iCloud. Being that it can’t though, a great use case for Dropbox would be to automatically sync photos between your phone and computer or externa local storage. It's a good backup solution for saving high quality photos that you just took in that moment.
However, if you’re just going to use Dropbox for that purpose, why not save money and go with a smaller yet well-established and more affordable option. Koofr is a cloud storage option similar to Dropbox. I’ve tested it out along with a few other competitors. It’s the closest in terms of speed and dependability. The UI isn’t as nice as Dropbox, but the company has been around for quite a while and the support team responded to my query very quickly. So, what do I mean by a more affordable option? Koofr is currently offering lifetime accounts for a limited time. Users can pay a fee just once with plans starting at $29.99 for 100GB of storage.
Backblaze
This is the service you want to have already been using when all hell breaks loose with your devices. Backblaze is an all around online backup solution. It’s not strictly for the phone or even all that mobile friendly actually. However, it’s much different than all the other services on this list.
With the other services on this list, you can easily search through your account and pull up a photo or video to share with your friends. You can technically access these files on Backblaze this way too, but its real strength is in being able to restore all of your data in case of complete data loss. With a $60 a year personal account, Backblaze allows users to backup an unlimited amount of data on one computer. The Backblaze app runs in the background, constantly backing up the latest data to its servers. Users can also plug in external hard drives and back those up as well, as long as it's connected to the main computer once every 30 days.
So, if that hard drive where you locally store your iPhone photo library dies, you just have to request a backup from Backblaze and they’ll send you a hard drive with all your backed up data. We’re talking terabytes worth of data saved here. Its not just media either, you can save all your documents and files with Backblaze. Use Backblaze in tandem with your other cloud storage solutions as the ultimate failsafe.
Phoneview
Phoneview by Ecamm isn’t a cloud storage service. Still, I thought it was definitely worth giving a quick mention here. It’s a Mac application that basically saves your iPhone data in an easily readbale format. Your call logs, text and iMessage history, web history, notes, voice memos, even specific app data can easily be pulled straight from you iPhone to your Mac. With so much attention given to photos and video, Phoneview is a great way to save everything else on your iPhone to a local backup.
Topics iPhone
