Most family photo disasters are not caused by a dead hard drive. They are caused by one account holding everything, a free tier filling up quietly, and nobody noticing the uploads stopped fourteen months ago. A backup plan is mostly arithmetic and two calendar reminders.
Measure the archive before buying another terabyte
Open Google One at one.google.com/storage or iCloud Settings → your name → iCloud → Manage Account Storage, and read the actual number. The free Google tier is 15 GB shared across Gmail, Drive and Photos, and 15 GB disappears fast once a phone is backing up 4K video at roughly 350 MB per minute.
Then estimate in the same units the storage plans use:
- A 12-megapixel HEIC photo runs about 2 MB. Five thousand of them, a normal year for a parent with a phone, is roughly 10 GB.
- Ten years of phone photos with some video: 150–300 GB.
- Scanned paper — school forms, insurance, deeds — is trivial by comparison. A 300 DPI colour PDF of an A4 page is 1–3 MB.
The 200 GB tier is $2.99 a month on both Google One and iCloud+, and 2 TB is $9.99 either way — the sweet spot for most households. Paying $120 a year to protect a decade of family history is a fair trade; paying it because you never checked is not.
One copy has to live offline
Cloud sync is not backup. Deleted-in-error propagates to every synced device within seconds, and a locked or banned account takes the whole archive with it. The old 3-2-1 rule still reads correctly for family data: three copies, on two kinds of media, with one of them somewhere else.
In practice: the cloud account, a local drive you own, and a third copy at a relative’s house or with a different company.
A 2 TB portable SSD such as a Samsung T7 costs about $150; a 2 TB USB hard drive about $65. Buy two and rotate them to get the offsite leg for free. Format exFAT for a mixed Windows and Mac household, label both with a marker, and keep the offsite drive out of the car — heat and cold cycles kill spinning disks.
Set uploads so the originals survive compression
Google Photos has two upload settings and the difference matters for anything you might print. Storage saver recompresses photos to about 16 MP and video to 1080p, which is fine for screenshots and memes. Original quality stores the file exactly as the camera wrote it and counts against your quota at full size.
The workable compromise: keep the phone on Original quality for the camera roll, and let everything else — WhatsApp images, screenshots, downloads — stay out of the backup by excluding those folders in Google Photos → Utilities → Backup → Back up device folders. On iPhone, iCloud Photos syncs originals but only with Optimize iPhone Storage enabled if the phone is small; the full-resolution file is downloaded on demand.
Name folders by year (2026/) and by event below it (2026/2026-07-14_birthday/). Date-modified sorting reorders your archive after any migration; a date prefix in the name never lies.
The restore drill you run twice a year
A backup you have never opened is a hope. Twice a year — put 1 January and 1 July in the calendar — spend fifteen minutes proving the archive works.
- Pick twelve files at random from three different years, including one video and one scanned document.
- Download them from the cloud, not from the phone that took them.
- Open each one fully. A file that previews but will not open is a truncated upload, and that is the failure mode you are hunting.
- Run a checksum on the local drive copy. On macOS,
shasum -a 256 file.jpg; on Windows,certutil -hashfile file.jpg SHA256. Compare against the cloud copy’s hash if the service exposes one, or simply confirm the local file and the downloaded file hash identically. - For the Google side, export a full archive through Google Takeout every six months, selecting Photos and splitting into 50 GB ZIP files. Keep the two most recent exports and delete the older ones; the export is your insurance against account loss, and it is only useful if it is recent.
Write the date of the last successful drill on a card taped inside the drive case.
Hand over access without handing over the account
Shared albums are the right tool for relatives who want to see the grandchildren; account access is wrong for almost everyone. A shared album lets people add and comment without seeing your mail or payment history, and one album per year stops anyone scrolling through 40,000 items.
The heavier question is what happens if you die or are hospitalised. Apple’s Digital Legacy lets you nominate an access key holder from iOS 15.2 onward; Google’s Inactive Account Manager at myaccount.google.com/inactive can share selected data with a trusted contact after a set period of inactivity, from 3 to 18 months. Both are five-minute jobs that most people never do, and both beat leaving a spouse to argue with a support queue.
For the paper side, keep scanned documents in one encrypted container rather than loose in Drive: 7-Zip with AES-256 on a Windows PC, or a VeraCrypt volume on the external drive, with the passphrase stored in your password manager. Then read the iPhone backup checklist for the device side, and see shared albums as a family fix for the distribution side. If storage is already tight, freeing space without losing memories is the step before this one, not a substitute for it.