Photo backup without the cloud: keep every family photo at home

Cloud storage is easy, but the bill grows with every photo, and every family member needs their own account and plan. If you have a computer at home, you can keep the whole family’s photos there instead, and pay nothing for storage.

What you need

• A computer that stays at home. A desktop is ideal. A laptop works too, as long as it is home and switched on regularly.
• Enough disk space. Look at how much space photos use on each phone (on iPhone: Settings, General, iPhone Storage; on Android: Settings, Storage) and add them up. Then allow room to grow: a family easily adds tens of gigabytes a year. An external drive of 2 TB or more costs less than a year of most cloud plans.
• Home Wi-Fi, so phones can send photos without a cable.

Keep more than one copy

One copy is not a backup. A disk can fail, a laptop can be stolen, and a house can flood. Photographers use the 3-2-1 rule:

• 3 copies of every photo,
• on 2 different kinds of storage (for example the computer and a USB drive),
• with 1 copy somewhere else (a relative’s house, or an encrypted cloud copy).

For most families, a realistic version is: the phones, the family computer, and a USB drive that you plug in now and then. Add a copy at a relative’s house when you can.

Three ways to do it

1. By hand, with a cable

Plug each phone into the computer and copy the camera folder. It is free and needs no app. It also depends on someone remembering to do it, for every phone, every month, and it copies screenshots and duplicates along with everything else.

2. With a photo transfer app

Apps that copy photos over Wi-Fi to a computer work well for one phone. With several phones, each one is set up on its own, and the photos land wherever each app puts them.

3. With a family backup app

This is what we are building with PhotoAlbumsMesh. Install it on the family computer, scan a code with each phone, and every phone backs up by itself whenever it is on the home Wi-Fi. Photos are sorted into folders by person and phone, then by year and month. Screenshots, receipts and near-identical shots stay on the phone. Trips become albums with photos from every phone.

Checklist

1. Choose the computer and the drive for the photos.
2. Check the free space against the size of all the phones’ photos.
3. Set up automatic backup for every phone, not only yours.
4. Add a second copy on a USB drive.
5. Once a year, open a few old photos from the backup to check that they work.

PhotoAlbumsMesh is not released yet. Join early access and we will tell you when it is ready.