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 is 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 R15/month for 50GB all the way to R1 200/month for 12TB, with various tiers in between. With an average iPhone photo clocking in at 3MB, that’s a little over 16 000 photos for the cheap plan and four million or so for the largest plan.
Google’s Google One cloud storage is most cost effective for yearly plans, with 2TB going for R1 850/year and 5TB going for R4 650/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 compatibility is unknown since the format h.
