How to Back Up Trip Photos Automatically

Every year, thousands of older travelers lose a phone on a cruise ship, in a taxi, or on a beach. If the phone has not been backing up its photos, the pictures are gone for good. No genius at the Apple Store and no friendly clerk at the Verizon store can pull photos off a phone that no longer exists. The single best protection is to turn on automatic photo backup before the trip starts, and then forget about it. Your phone does the rest in the background while you eat gelato.

There are two trusted services that back up photos automatically. iPhone owners use iCloud Photos, which is built into every iPhone. Android owners use Google Photos, a free app that comes with most Android phones and can also be installed on iPhones. Both services do the same job. As soon as you take a photo, the phone quietly uploads a copy to your account on the cloud. If the phone is lost, the photos are safe and can be downloaded to a new phone, a tablet, or a laptop.

The key thing to check before your trip is whether you have enough cloud storage. Apple gives every iCloud account five gigabytes of free space, which fills up fast on a long trip. Most travelers need the fifty gigabyte plan, which costs about ninety-nine cents a month, or the two hundred gigabyte plan at three dollars a month. Google gives every Google account fifteen gigabytes of free storage, shared with Gmail and Google Drive. The one hundred gigabyte plan is one dollar ninety-nine a month. These prices are tiny compared to the cost of losing a lifetime of photos.

The second thing to check is whether your phone is set to back up over cellular data or only over wi-fi. On a cruise ship or in a foreign country, cellular data can be very expensive. The safe setting is wi-fi only. Most hotels, airports, and cruise ships have free wi-fi, and the phone will quietly upload your photos each evening when you connect to the hotel network.

Do not turn on automatic backup the morning of your flight. Turn it on a week before. That way, all the photos already on your phone have time to upload, and on travel day you only need to worry about the new pictures. Once everything is set, you can take a thousand photos of the Grand Canyon or the canals of Venice without a single worry. Even if a wave knocks the phone into the ocean, the memories are safe.