Picking One System and Sticking With It
Okay so this is the lesson where I get a little bossy, so bear with me.
You've got options for backing up your phone photos. iPhone people have iCloud. Android people usually have Google Photos, but there's also Samsung's own cloud thing depending on your phone, and there's OneDrive, and Dropbox, and probably four other apps I haven't even tried. And I feel like this is exactly where people get stuck. They start researching which one is "best" and three weeks go by and nothing's backed up.
Here's my opinion, and I hold it firmly: one system, done okay, beats three systems done perfectly. Actually, it beats three systems period, because in my experience nobody actually finishes setting up all three. They get halfway into Google Photos, get confused, try iCloud instead, turn on OneDrive because a coworker mentioned it, and now they've got a mess spread across three places and they don't trust any of them. Which is worse than doing nothing, honestly, because at least if you'd done nothing you'd know to be worried.
Why this matters so much to me
I told you about my "storage full" moment already, at Skylar's piano recital, phone just quitting on me mid-song, having to grab the last thirty seconds off Travis's phone instead. What I didn't mention is what happened after. I got so mad that weekend that I turned on every backup option I could find. iCloud, Google Photos, an old Dropbox account I'd forgotten I had. I felt very responsible. Very on top of things.
Six months later I needed to find photos from a specific week and I had no idea where they actually were. Some had backed up to iCloud. Some were sitting in Google Photos because I'd downloaded the app once and it auto-enabled itself. It was chaos, just a different flavor of chaos than "storage full." So I get the impulse to do all of them. I did it too. It doesn't work.
How to actually pick
You don't need a spreadsheet for this. Here's roughly how I'd think about it:
If you have an iPhone, iCloud is the obvious first pick. It's already built into your phone, it's already asking you to turn it on, and it talks to all your other Apple stuff without you doing anything extra. Unless you have a strong reason to go a different direction, just use iCloud.
If you have an Android phone, Google Photos is usually the simplest answer. It comes on most Android phones already and it's the one I see recommended most in this room when I ask the Android folks to help each other out (which, again, is most of you, since I'm shakier on Android than iPhone and I'll say that plainly).
That's it. That's the whole decision tree for most people. I feel like people want it to be more complicated than that, and mostly it isn't.
What "sticking with it" actually looks like
Picking the system is the easy part. Sticking with it means:
- You turn on automatic backup, not manual. If you have to remember to do it, you won't do it. I've watched this happen to people I love.
- You don't also install a second backup app "just in case." One system. If you're nervous about it, that nervousness is normal, and we'll talk about how to actually check that it's working in a later lesson. You don't fix nervousness by adding more apps.
- You give it time to actually finish. If you've got thousands of photos, the first backup can take hours, sometimes overnight, especially over home wifi. Don't panic and turn it off because it's slow. Slow is normal. Broken is different, and we'll cover how to tell those apart.
About the free storage question
Both iCloud and Google Photos give you a little bit of storage for free, and then they start asking you to pay once you go over it, usually somewhere around 5 to 15 gigabytes depending on the service and what else is sharing that storage. A lot of people I talk to try very hard to stay under that free limit forever. They delete things they don't want to delete, they resist backing up video because video eats space fast, they get anxious about the whole thing.
I think that's a waste of energy. The paid tiers are usually two or three dollars a month for enough space to cover years of phone photos. I feel like your time is worth more than that. Pay the two bucks. Stop rationing your own memories to save less than the cost of a gas station drink.
One caution
If you do have more than one backup system already turned on from past tinkering, don't just start switching things off randomly today. Turning off a cloud backup can sometimes prompt the phone to ask if you want to delete the photos that were only living in the cloud and not on your phone anymore. We're going to walk through checking that safely together, so for now, just notice what you've got running and don't touch anything yet.
Before next time: figure out which system you're already leaning toward, iCloud or Google Photos, and have that phone charged and in hand next class so we can go turn it on together, step by step.