When I was a kid, we didn’t have digital cameras, so we had far less photos than we do in this day and age of the smartphone. We had shoe boxes, not hard drives and camera cards. The “cloud” didn’t exist. To lose everything took either a catastrophic event like a home burning down, or a natural disaster.

Today, the reasons for total and often irreversible data loss vary, but almost all of them happen in a matter of seconds, and happen every day, every hour, even every minute, all around the world: Accidentally dropping a phone, kids discovering gravity with your device, or just spontaneous failure, like suddenly not being able to boot up. If you’re lucky, you’ll discover the world’s best data recovery company. If you’re unlucky, you may lose your best or only chance of getting your data back by using the wrong data recovery company where the objective is not maximizing data recovery success.

You can’t prevent disaster, but you can prevent data loss.

In this article I’m going to share a solution for protecting all your photos and videos, no matter how much you take, no matter how much you have, and regardless of whether you use a Mac, a PC or even if you’re mobile only. I’m also going to share an iPhone data loss risk scenario you probably aren’t aware of, just to give you an example of how any can suddenly lose data. that can affect any iPhone owner. More important, I’m going to explain how you can prevent it from happening to you.

First, some background info for context:

why Photos get more valuable over time

We’re all amassing a lot of data. Files including documents, notes, email, photos and videos on your computer, smartphone and tablet, and the backups and archives on flash drives and external hard drives where we periodically dump files, either because we filled up a device, or during transition to a new one. Then there’s even the files you forget you had in various cloud locations, whether it’s DropBox, Apple’s iCloud, Microsoft’s OneDrive, or who-knows-where else the device decided to put your stuff. The point is, there’s stuff everywhere.

Most data typically gets less valuable over time. That really amazing presentation I put days of my life into several years ago isn’t even relevant any more. I can’t even remember most of the letters I wrote in Microsoft Word or Clarisworks back in the day. Heck, even my painstakingly collected music collection is not as important now that I have access to almost every music track ever recorded with streaming music. There’s one category of data though that gets more valuable with time: Photos and videos.

Our camera roll is the new daily diary

Your photos and videos encompass so much of your life story. The events that define your life, the people you love, your travels and adventures. Even our lives are now captured in a new kind of journaling, a new kind of diary: Your phone’s camera roll. Not necessarily everyone would agree, but I think the majority of us would say the photos and videos we take are the most precious and important data in our lives.

A Data Disaster example: Photos in the Cloud (is not what you think)

Which is why it’s terrifying how easy it is to lose years of your photos and videos in an instant. Take for example your iPhone: If you’ve enabled Apple’s iCloud backup, the expectation is that your photos are safe. The reality is different. Read the fine print on Apple’s public-facing article “What does iCloud backup?” (Apple kbase article #HT207428, published January 16, 2020). Not even in the article body, but in a footnote, it says “When you use […] turn on iCloud Photos, your content is automatically stored in iCloud. That means they're not included in your iCloud Backup” (bold added). This may not seem like a problem, until you accidentally delete a photo, or an album, or your entire camera roll.

A few months ago someone called me and explained that one accidental swipe on her iPhone deleted photos across all her devices, right in front of her eyes. She was helpless to stop it. She restored her phone from the latest backup that was only one day old, expecting it to restore her photos. Upon doing this she noticed that not only was the album she accidentally deleted still gone, but the last two years photos were also gone. Four years worth of photos, including vacations, pictures of her children, and recent photos of a family member who had passed away. Upon closer inspection, her iCloud hadn’t synced for over two years because it ran out of space. She was devastated.

To make matters worse, in many of these cases, as is the case with iCloud, data recovery isn’t even possible. This is just one type of data loss. Stand in the back of an Apple Store for any amount of time listening to customers telling the Genius their story, and you’ll be surprised. There are hundreds of ways to lose data, and each story almost always ends with “why didn’t anyone tell me this could happen?”

The only way is to know where risks are and avoid them. Way back in 2003 Reuters wrote “The IT industry is the only industry that beta tests on consumers, rather than for them.” The only difference between 2003 and 2020 is that software bugs, glitches and issues are now in the national news, and no longer just the exclusive realm of techs. You’ve got to be informed, and you have to protect yourself. In the next section I’m going to show you how.

How not to lose your photos and videos

In 2019, a company in Northern California called Mosss made a big mistake. They accidentally deleted all their files in Google Drive. Within one hour, they noticed that years of data was gone. When they contacted Google, there was nothing that could be done. Besides investors who had invested $1.5M into the business, tens of thousands of hours of work by their employees was gone, permanently, in an instant.

The real problem wasn’t the IT guy’s mistake, although there’s an acronym I learned at Apple that’s appropriate for this situation: CLM (“Career Limiting Move”). The real problem was that they didn’t check just one box. A box called Data Retention.

Data retention is the new backup

Google G-Suite for Business includes a feature that isn’t activated by default, but it’s important enough that Google places it front and center in all their marketing: Data Retention. What data retention does is protect all your core G-Suite data, including Google Drive, no matter what happens. If you delete your entire Google Drive, with data retention on and configured you can bring it all back. It’s a feature designed for businesses that simply cannot afford to lose data: Hospitals, banks, legal firms all have a legal obligation to protect their customers (and patients) data. Quite frankly, I can’t think of a business that shouldn’t have this enabled.

Unlimited photos and videos, always backed up, on all your devices

Here’s why this is exciting: When you subscribe to Google G-Suite for Business, you not only get unlimited data storage for Google Photos, but you also get the option for turning data retention on.

This means you can migrate your entire Photos library (or Libraries!) to Google Photos securely and safely, and the Google Photos app can also be installed on all your smart devices, then configured to automatically upload and backup all the photos you take with your device’s camera.

Next, using Google’s “Take-Out” feature, you can periodically make snapshots of all your Google Photo library content - all your photos and videos of a lifetime - and keep a copy safely in Google Drive, in addition to keeping originals stashed away on inexpensive USB drives. I do both. Today, I’ve successfully migrated nearly 30 terabytes (30TB) of photos and videos into Google Photos, shared the master library with my wife, and we can now access more than a lifetime of photos and videos on any of our devices, instantly, including on our TVs, without hogging space on the devices.

It’s family photo perfection.

WHERE TO GET G-Suite and Google Photos

You can always sign up for a free gmail account, which will get you access to most Google Apps including Google Photos, but a free account has very limited storage, only 15GB.

G-Suite is Google’s professional version of Google Apps. In fact, in 2007 it was actually called Google Apps for your domain, and later renamed to G-Suite. To use G-Suite, you create an account that uses your own domain name, not a gmail.com address. That alone is fantastic and incredibly beneficial to anyone, because gmail on G-Suite has enhanced privacy and security, no ads, and the best spam protection in the world. With a G-Suite for business account, you can get access to unlimited data and data retention, which together with Google Photos, is the foundation of the solution this article is about. Want to learn more and sign up for G-Suite? Check it out here.

If you need help or want to share your feedback, message me here or connect with me on twitter or instagram. Finally, please share this article with everyone you know so they can keep all their photos safe.

Thanks for reading!