Backing Up To The Cloud May Not Be Enough To Save Beloved Photos

With Christmastime and family gatherings upon us, the cameras and cellphones will be capturing digital images of us and our loved ones and saving them in the cloud for sharing and viewing. But I worry a bit about storing all those memories in the cloud because of a recent experience with cloud storage.

As you may know, I take hundreds and thousands of photos in Eagle Observer territory at events and school activities in order to post a few in print on the pages of the Westside Eagle Observer. But, for every photo which is printed, there are usually many, many more which, though they are good photos, never get published. What happens to them?

With limited computer hard-drive space, I saved them to the cloud and literally had hundreds of thousands of photos saved by date on a cloud server. I paid only a small out-of-pocket fee to keep them there, so I thought it was worth it. But the company changed hands and prices are going up, the free package was very limited and continuing to store my photos on that cloud became unaffordable to me. What do I do?

My first thought was to download and save all my photos to local hard drives, but do you know how long it takes to download nearly 1.5 terabytes in zipped files? Well, I didn’t have days and days to do nothing but download compressed files of photos, so I decided I’d have to narrow down what I save and download, keeping only personal family photos and a few special shots I didn’t wish to lose. And to do that required deleting and deleting albums and albums of photos — I lost count but estimated it at almost 400,000 photos. That’s right, nearly a half million photos of events, activities, people and memories!

I wouldn’t have done it if I had a choice, but a deadline was approaching and I only had time to save some of my photos before the new company hit the delete button for me if I didn’t pay up. I kind of felt like my photos were kidnapped by a new company with a different set of rules and a ransom was demanded of me if I didn’t want my photos to be killed. Well, I don’t bargain with terrorists, so I saved what I could and the rest are gone forever!

Why do I tell you this? Simply, because the same could happen to you and your photos stored in the cloud. You might have free storage or “unlimited” storage for a small fee but what happens if and when someone else takes over the cloud where your photos are stored? It may not be hundreds of thousands of photos, but it could be your personal and family photos that are held for ransom if you don’t pay up. And, if you don’t or can’t pay the ransom price, they’ll be deleted and gone forever.

To be honest with you, I’m not sure what the answer is. What you save and store at home can be gone too, in a moment, if a hard drive is corrupted or if a computer is lost or stolen. In the days of film, we had negatives if prints were destroyed — actually, I still have boxes and drawers of negatives and slides — but they can deteriorate over time if not stored properly, and an event like a fire or flood could destroy them as well.

I suppose the best plan to have is one with a backup included. If you save your photos to the cloud, save them on a hard drive at home, too. If you save them on your computer, back them up in the cloud or on an external drive and store it somewhere else. If you take all these precautions, maybe your photos won’t be lost forever.

But, oh, what if the software changes and the digital format in which your photos are saved becomes outdated and unusable? I have old document files that are in obsolete formats and it is difficult to find any program to open them. What if that happened to Joint Photographic Experts Group files, Tagged Information File Format files, Adobe Photoshop files or to the other photo formats available out there? And, if you save the old software, what if the new hardware won’t run it?

This could turn into a photographer’s nightmare, so I better stop and just suggest not only backing up to the cloud but backing up the cloud too! RANDY MOLL IS THE MANAGING EDITOR OF THE WESTSIDE EAGLE OBSERVER. HE MAY BE CONTACTED BY EMAIL AT RMOLL@NWADG.COM. OPINIONS EXPRESSED ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR.