If your phone is the only place you can find your family photos, start there. Pick one important album to begin with. Once copying and restoring make sense, repeat the process for the rest.
Make your first backup
- Choose a small sample. Pick one older photo, one recent photo and a video. That gives you a way to check both older files and videos.
- Copy them to a computer and an external drive. Connect with a USB cable that supports file transfers and unlock the phone. In the Windows Photos app, select Import. If the phone asks for permission, confirm the connection to your own computer. You can also download the photos from your cloud service. Create a dated folder on the external drive and copy the files into it. Safely eject the drive when you finish.
- Try restoring from the drive. Reconnect it and copy a photo and a video into a new folder on the computer. Open both files. This simple test shows whether you can still reach them without the phone.
If your photos are already in the cloud
Check that you can see the photos on the service’s website or on another device. Look up what happens when a photo is deleted. Sync can pass the deletion on to other devices. A separate copy helps if you can no longer recover the file from the cloud.
For photos you especially want to keep, hold three copies. For example, keep the collection on a computer, a copy on an external drive and a separate cloud backup. Pick a schedule you can stick to and occasionally open a recent file from the backup.
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