More and more of us are saving our photos in the cloud. Thanks to this we manage to have a backup copy of them on an external server, access them from any device and anywhere and, in addition, free up space in the memory of our mobile. By mistake, we think that our photos are safe there and will be saved forever. But really it’s not so.
This week we saw a clear example of the problems that the cloud can have. Without going any further, one of the most used and well-known platforms, Google Photos, was affected by a serious error that corrupted users’ photos for reasons that, to date, have not yet been revealed. It is not very well known what happened to it, but many of the users who relied on this platform to save their most important memories have been left without them.
This has happened in Google Photos, but it can happen the same if we use iCloud, Amazon, OneDrive, or any other cloud that allows us to save our photos. And it is that, although it does not have to, computing is very random, and at any moment a fault can appear that makes us lose our photos or our data.
Therefore, if we use this type of service, and we want to make sure that we do not lose our data under any circumstances, this is what we must do yes or yes.
Create a backup of the photos in another cloud
The only way to protect ourselves from all these problems is to backup photos and save it somewhere else. Luckily, thanks to the data protection law, companies have to offer us, compulsorily, a way to download all our personal data, including photos. And this is the function that we are going to take advantage of.
Google photos
Google offers us a tool called Takeout from which we will be able to download all our personal information to have it and be able to save it wherever we want. Unlike other clouds, Google allows us to choose what data we want to download, so we can only select the photos and have them inside a very comfortable ZIP.
Download photos with Google Takeout.
iCloud
Similar to Google, Apple also has a privacy section from which we can download all our personal information. Like its rival, it allows us to choose the data that we want, or don’t want, to download from the cloud in order to have them all on the PC in the form of a compressed file. Of course, we will select the photos, and save them somewhere else safely.
Access the iCloud privacy section.
amazon
If we are one of those who have taken advantage of the unlimited storage of photos in Amazon Drive , we will also be able to download our data to easily save them elsewhere. To do this we will have to access the following request and indicate that we want to download a copy of the data stored on Amazon Drive, the company’s cloud drive.
Access the Amazon data request.
Upload the photos to another cloud
Now that we have our data, we only have to make a backup copy of it. The ideal is to use the 3-2-1 method, or what is the same, to have 3 backup copies, 2 of them in different media, and one of them always saved in a different physical place. For example, having one copy (the main one) on Google Photos (or equivalent), the main copy compressed on OneDrive, and the other copy on an external hard drive at home.
It is not necessary to upload them to access them as if it were a new photo library. We can simply upload the downloaded file directly, where all our photos are, and save it in the compressed cloud as a backup. In addition to occupying less space we will have fewer problems.
And, as a final trick, we must put the date on which we generated it at the end of the file name. And, from time to time, make a new backup of the photos, in the same way, replacing the previous copy.
