Why Your Photos Are the One Thing You Should Always Back Up
Lose your phone and you can buy another. The photos on it are gone for good.
Short answer: most of what's on your phone already lives somewhere else — your email is on a server, your contacts and messages sync automatically. Your photos are the exception. They're big, they're one of a kind, and if they aren't copied somewhere safe, losing your phone means losing them. A copy on a drive you own is the surest way to keep them.
Everything else has a backup already
Think about what's actually on your phone. Your email lives on a mail server, so a new phone just signs back in and it's all there. Your contacts, notes, and messages sync quietly in the background. These things are small, and they're copied the moment you create them — you never think about it because you never have to.
Your photos are the exception
Photos and videos are different. They're large — a few years of them can run to tens of gigabytes — and they often exist in exactly one place: your phone. Unless something is actively copying them somewhere else, there is no second copy. Lose the phone, drop it, have it stolen, and the only copy goes with it.
They're worth far more than the phone
A phone is a few hundred dollars and a trip to the store. The photos on it are your kid's first steps, a trip you'll never retake, people you can't photograph again. You can replace the device in an afternoon. You can't replace a single one of those moments. That gap — cheap to replace, impossible to replace — is exactly why photos deserve a backup of their own.
Isn't that what iCloud is for?
It can be, and for small things it's great. But to hold your full photo library, iCloud means paying every month and letting every photo leave your phone for a company's servers. Once a copy is on the internet, it's one more place that can be breached, mislabeled as shared, or seen by someone you didn't intend. For the most personal thing you own, that's a real tradeoff — not a free one.
A drive you own keeps them close
There's a simpler option: copy your photos to a USB-C drive that stays in your drawer. It's a one-time purchase, not a monthly bill. The photos never touch the internet, so there's nothing to leak and no account to breach. And you hold the only copy that matters — on something you can put in your hand. That's the whole idea behind Very Good Photo Backup: your photos go from your phone to your drive, and nowhere else.
Keep the one thing you can't replace — on a drive you own.
See Very Good Photo Backup