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Take back photos from Big Tech in 2023

I’m guessing you took thousands, if not more, of photos and videos in 2022, because with a smartphone in our pockets, it was just so easy to do.

And like most people, if you thought about backup at all, you did what was easiest. You signed up for the automatic backup programs on Apple and Google, which made copies of the photos and videos on your phone, and placed them into the “cloud” for a monthly fee.

But as we talked about several times in 2022, what if Apple or Google stopped liking you? What if the companies, rightly or wrongly, decided you violated their terms of services and locked you out of your account? (Read this blockbuster piece in the New York Times for more about how this actually keeps happening.) What if you suddenly died, and forgot to leave your password behind for loved ones? All your photos would be unavailable to future generations and lost forever. (Please take a minute RIGHT NOW and share your digital photo passwords with loved ones!)

New Year’s project: Make 2023 the year you took back your digital footprint and control of your images. How to do that? Thanks for asking. I have several ideas.

OWC releases Copy That for Mac to let you quickly copy, backup and verify your media cards

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Other World Computing (OWC), manufacturer of memory and storage-related products has released their new Copy That for Mac software. They describe it as “an intuitive, easy to use backup tool for content creators”. The software lets you quickly and easily ingest your memory cards ready for editing, but will also automatically create backups to multiple sources and verify that they all copied over correctly.

It complies with the industry standard “3-2-1 rule“, which states that there should be at least three copies of the data stored on two different types of media, with one copy kept offsite in some kind of remote storage or cloud system and its verification system ensures that the data is always copied to all of its targets accurately.

How to get your photos and videos backed up so you don’t lose them forever

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Backing up is always a hotly debated topic. Even just whether to back up or not is often a cause of conflict in a lot of social media photography groups. And even if you have chosen to backup your work, you’ll see three million responses describing exactly how you should back everything up in order to ensure you never lose anything – and they’ll all be different. Ultimately, everybody has the workflow that works best for them.

But what will work best for you? If you’re just thinking about backing up your photos and video, or even if you do already but you want to learn more about other backup technologies, this video from Gordon Laing will set you off on the right foot. In it, he talks about a whole bunch of different backup options along with the pros and potential cons of each.

Amazon, Google, SmugMug, Apple: what’s the best home for your photos?

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When last we met, I pointed out the perils of using Apple’s iCloud Photos for photo backup for one simple reason: if you delete an image off your iPhone, Apple will in turn also delete it from iCloud*.

This time I’d like to go over the best alternative photo backup options for you in more detail, because like it or not, in today’s world, just like paying for food, shelter and taxes, if you snap photos on your smartphone or camera, you will be paying for online storage. And paying more in the coming years as well, as you snap more images.

There’s no such thing as free backup anymore.

Don’t use iCloud to backup your photos

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My friend Bill just returned from a family vacation in Costa Rica and shot lots of photos and video on his iPhone, including some killer shots of breakfasts with local monkeys.

No surprise that once he got home, he checked his iPhone storage and found that it was 98% full. Just a few more snaps, and he’d be totally out of room.

His solution? “I’ll just put them all on iCloud, and then delete them off my iPhone,” he told me.

How to back up your photos and video on location the easy way with a smartphone and an SSD

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I’ve been through various iterations of location backup workflows over the years. When I started out with DSLRs back in 2002 I was using the Super DigiBin, which allowed me to pull files off my huge 128MB CompactFlash cards and back them up onto a (for the time) ridiculously huge 20GB hard drive.

Things have come a long way in the last couple of decades since I relied on that Super DigiBin. These days, I back up my memory cards to SSDs quickly and easily on location using my smartphone. OWC recently sent over their Envoy Pro Elektron SSD and 5-port USB hub for us to try, so I thought this would be a good time to show you my current location backup workflow and offer up some of my thoughts on the OWC gear.

PSA: Google’s free cloud photo storage ends in 2 weeks – Here are eight alternatives

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Last November, Google announced that its free unlimited photo backup was going to end and it would all fall under the free shared 15GB get you with Google’s other services, like Gmail and Google Drive. Now, it’s almost upon us, with the service set to shut down on June 1st. You can, of course, upgrade to Google One (although there’s no “Unlimited” package), but what are your alternatives?

Well, none of the alternatives are really free, either. Not for unlimited storage, anyway. But with Google shifting over to a paid-only option with minimal free storage, the advantage they once had is now gone. Here we take a look at a few of the competing services for you to check out and see which best fits your needs.

PSA: Amazon Photos auto-save might not be auto-saving all of your raw files

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The whole cloud backup thing has been a hot topic for a while now as various services have been simultaneously killing off unlimited storage while others have been bringing it back and trying to outdo each other to win over your business. Amazon Photos is one such service that offers unlimited space as long as you have a prime account – including your raw photos. But it seems it’s not backing up everything – even if you think that it is.

Reddit user /u/somebodytoshove posted to /r/photography noting that the auto-save feature of the Amazon Photos iOS app has not been uploading the .raf files from his Fuji mirrorless camera. It thinks it has, and it looks like it has, but when you look at the uploaded files, they actually contain only the jpg preview.

Fujifilm breaks backup storage records with a tape that can hold 580 Terabytes

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Fujifilm has shattered backup storage records with a new magnetic tape backup solution that offers around 50x the capacity of current commercially available LTO-8 tapes – which hold around 12TB of uncompressed data. Fuji’s new format stands at a whopping 580TB of data storage, thanks to the development of a new magnetic particle called Strontium Ferrite (SrFe).

The new system was developed in conjunction with IBM Research and provides a single tape with enough space to store the equivalent of 120,000 DVDs. They say that the newly developed magnetic material allows for finer particles and denser storage while still offering a high level of performance.

5 alternatives to Google Photos cloud storage for backing up your work

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Google Photos has been one of the best photo hosting cloud services out there, offering storage for an unlimited number of your photos absolutely free – as long as you didn’t mind a slight hit in image quality. But that is coming to an end and Google is abandoning its free tier. You still get your free 15GB (shared across all Google services, like Gmail, etc), but if you want any more than that, you’ll have to pay now.

It was a sweet ride while it lasted, and there aren’t really any great free alternatives out there now. But now that you do have to pay, what are the other top paid alternatives out there? Let’s take a look at five of them.

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