How To: Use Amazon Photos To Backup Your iPhone
3 min read
Everyone has a smartphone or mobile device with a camera on it. Chances are you own an iPhone. Like many others users I would bet you are struggling with the thousands and thousands of photos you have taken on your new device and how to back them up. One slip of the hand and the phone is submerged in the toilet, ran over by a car or lost on the bus. Tragedy can happen at anytime and you need to be comforted that your photos are backed up and still retrievable.
Prior posts showed you how you can use Dropbox and Google Photos as a service to backup your iPhone photos. This post focuses on Amazon Photos. Unlike the other services this one is not free but is vastly more robust and powerful as a reliable backup solution for not just your iPhone but your desktop PC as well. When you look at the costs involved you need to put the proper context around it. In today’s world most of the apps and services that are the most popular are ‘free’. Free is in quotations because there is no such think as a free lunch. Free only means no financial exchange, your behavior, personal info, contact lists and purchasing habits are what you are paying with. In this world of technological integration of our daily lives it’s OK to pay to maintain it. They are not ripoffs and paid services are actually better than free in many ways. Amazon Cloud Storage is one of those services that is worth shelling out a few dollars a month. It’s still far cheaper per year than a new external hard drive and significantly less expensive than losing your irreplaceable photos and files that cannot have a value placed upon them.
Amazon Photos comes in two paid flavors. Unlimited Photos and Unlimited Everything.
Unlimited Photos is only for photos from any device, mobile or PC. You get an additional 5GB of storage for anything else, videos count as files not photos so they are not unlimited. 5GB may seem like a lot but when you add in video and music files that space can be used up quickly.
Unlimited Everything is what Binary Blogger uses. It’s for everything. At the time of this writing I have 58GB used, mostly photos and videos and I am not done organizing older archives to load up. The rest are important files I wanted backed up in a secure, external location outside of my offices and own hardware.
The Amazon Photos app runs on my iPhone and syncs my photos over Wi-Fi and the Macs have the Amazon Cloud Storage app that syncs my folders up. Right now if I lost my phone and two macs, aide from being a major inconvenience, I am confident I am not going to lose anything important and can restore.
That’s how a backup strategy, business or personal, should be. Rely on your hardware but don’t be dependent on it. Data is they king not the device.
The Unlimited Everything is $60 for the year, that’s only $6/mo or one large fluffy coffee with extra whip at your local coffee shop. You decide on the value.
End of line.
Binary Blogger has spent 20 years in the Information Security space currently providing security solutions and evangelism to clients. From early web application programming, system administration, senior management to enterprise consulting I provide practical security analysis and solutions to help companies and individuals figure out HOW to be secure every day.
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