Taking photographs used to be a careful, conscious act. Photos were selective, frozen moments in time carefully archived in albums and frames. Now, taking a photograph is almost as effortless and common as breathing – it’s something that people do all the time in the age of smartphone cameras with seemingly endless digital film.
But the downside to capturing every moment is that it creates a mountain of those moments to save for the future. Those photos can be easily lost if they’re not archived properly. All it can take is one accidental dip in the toilet for your phone, and all that data is lost forever.
So what’s a practical backup strategy for the average person? Here are a few ways to make sure memories are never lost: The simplest way to archive your photos is cloud storage. For Apple users, there’s iCloud , which starts at US$0.99 per month for 50 gigabytes all the way to $59.
99 per month for 12 terabytes with various tiers in between. With an average iPhone photo clocking in at 3 megabytes, that’s a little over 16,000 photos for the cheap plan and 4 million or so for the largest plan. Google’s Google One cloud storage is most cost effective for yearly plans, with 2TB going for $99.
99 per year and 5TB going for $249.99 per year. The actual amount you can store in that space does vary greatly with how a file is shot.
Video has larger file sizes than photos. HEIF files , a newer format on Apple phones, compresses files into smaller packages, but long-term c.