Photo Backup Strategy

I once did a small mental exercise. I asked myself: If my house burned down, what would I really miss?

If the people made it out. If the pets made it out. Almost everything else felt replaceable. Furniture can be replaced. Clothes can be replaced. Even important documents can usually be recovered.

The one thing that kept coming back to me was photos.

Not just the good ones. Not the curated ones. The ordinary ones. The pictures you don't think about until you can't find them anymore.

So while my house is unlikely to burn down, the exercise stuck with me. It made one thing very clear: keeping my photos safe is a priority in my life.

Maybe that's over the top. But if it matters to me, that's reason enough.

The Problem of Invisible Systems

Over time, my photos have ended up in a few places. Apple Photos. Google Photos. Dropbox. Each one serves a purpose. Each one backs up the others.

The problem is that this system only makes sense to me.

I'm pretty sure my wife has no idea that some of our photos live in Google Photos. I'm not convinced she could tell you what Dropbox is. On a good day, it's probably a 50/50 shot. And that's not a failure on her part. It's just how these things evolve. Systems grow quietly, one decision at a time, until they're invisible to everyone except the person maintaining them.

Mapping the Memories

That's why I saved a note explaining my photo backup strategy. Not where every photo is, but where to look.

Which services matter. And how they fit together.

If something ever happened, I don't want photos to be lost simply because no one knew where they were stored. I don't want important memories trapped behind accounts that no one thinks to check.

So I wrote it down. Because some things are worth being careful about—even if the risk feels remote. Especially if the risk feels remote.