By Gaurang Bham, Technical Writer
The Fourth Of July is always a momentous part of the year; we celebrate the birth of our great nation in the company of friends, family and a nice barbeque! Top it all off with fireworks, and you’re in for a weekend full of merriment and memories. Holidays like this are usually documented with photos and videos and all of those media files take up large amounts space on devices, which could potentially be lost if you are not careful. That is why the day after these holidays is a good time to make sure your pictures are backed up to other sources in the case you need to remove (or recover!) them from your phone in a jiffy.
Here are 5 ways that you can ensure that your pictures stay safe while keeping your phone storage free:
iPhone Back Up
If you own an iPhone/iPad you have two potential options to freeing up space on your device. The first of the two using iCloud. iCloud is a Cloud-based service run by Apple that’s mission is to sync up all your Apple Devices in order for all of your data to be available on all of them in real time. It is convenient because, upon setup of your account, your devices automatically back up all of your data to the Cloud and make them accessible to all of your Apple products. This approach requires constant internet access in order to work, so if you are in an area with spotty reception, or trying to minimize data usage, it may not be the best choice. The iCloud desktop application is only available for Mac, so users with Windows PCs will lose out on some of the advantages of real-time syncing. Additionally, many users find it difficult to keep photos in the Cloud while deleting them from their phones. With phone storage limited, this can be a major hassle. Apple gives iCloud users 5GB of cloud storage free, with rising rates for anything beyond that.
Back Up to iTunes
Apple also allows for direct back up to iTunes when you connect your device to your computer. Simply open up iTunes, go to your phone storage settings and you will see the option to back up your iPhone. Upon doing so, all of the memory on your phone will be stored within your iTunes so that in the event you have to replace your phone, all of your settings, apps and storage can be downloaded onto this new device without any adjustment. One downside to this is that, in the event that you do remove pictures from your phone after backing it up, restoring from the initial backup can cause newer photos to be deleted if the right settings are not enabled. Furthermore, backing up your phone only makes that storage accessible on an iPhone and you will not be able to view it via a computer or any other device.
Dropbox
A more popular way to back up storage is Dropbox. Dropbox belongs to a class of Cloud services called File Sync and Share (FSS) that allows you tosave any file to the Cloud and access it on any device or platform by just signing into your account. While this is great for storing all kinds of media, most people only care about the storage of their pictures and videos, which are memory heavy, and with a 2GB limit for the free account, Dropbox quickly loses steam the the majority of casual tech users, which leads us to our next option:
Google Photos- Like Google Drive, Photos is Cloud based software that can store all of your data to your Google Account and can be accessed from anywhere. What makes this better than Dropbox is the fact that you are allotted up 15GBb of storage which should be enough to accommodate most people’s storage needs. Google’s multi-platform system allows you to upload your photos directly from your phone to the Cloud and vice versa.
External Hard Drive
And last but not least, you can always back up all of your storage to an external hard drive. Base hard drives usually store 1 TB of storage, connect via USB and can hold all of your data for many years to come without fear of ever losing space or data. You could probably pick one up for about $50 today and never have to worry about storage issues ever again.