Photos are the one thing people can’t replace. Everything else — documents, email, the computer itself — can be rebuilt or bought again.

And almost everyone we talk to believes their photos are already safe, because they’re in iCloud or Google Photos.

Sync is not backup

A sync service keeps your devices matching each other. That’s handy: get a new phone and your photos appear on it.

But it means deletion syncs too. If a photo is deleted on the phone, it disappears from the cloud, and from the tablet, and from the laptop. That’s how sync is meant to work.

Recycle bins soften this. iCloud keeps deleted photos for 30 days; Google Photos keeps backed-up ones for 60, and 30 if they were never backed up. That saves you if you notice quickly. It doesn’t save you from a folder that was tidied up eighteen months ago.

How the photos get lost

In practice, the photos we’re asked to recover are rarely lost to a dramatic failure. It’s usually one of these:

  • Someone freed up space by deleting “duplicates” and the deletion synced everywhere
  • The free storage filled up, syncing silently stopped, and months of photos only ever existed on the phone that was later lost
  • An account was locked or lost after a password reset on a phone number no longer in use
  • Photos were on an old phone in a drawer, and the drawer phone won’t charge any more
  • A child’s account, a shared family account, or an ex-partner’s account held the only copy

None of these are hardware failures. They’re account problems or ordinary mistakes, and a second copy that isn’t linked to the same account protects against nearly all of them.

The simple version of the fix

The fix is simple: keep one more copy, somewhere the first one can’t reach.

The easiest version for most households:

  • Keep using iCloud or Google Photos — that’s your everyday convenience copy
  • Once or twice a year, copy the whole photo library to an external drive
  • Keep that drive unplugged, and not in the same room as the computer if you can
  • Write the date on it

An unplugged drive can’t be synced, deleted or hit by ransomware, and once a year is enough for photos, because photos you took last month are still on the phone.

Check the storage warning

Take a minute today to check whether your phone’s cloud storage is full.

Storage-full warnings are easy to ignore, but once the free storage fills up, syncing stops. People carry on taking photos for months believing they’re being backed up. If it’s full, either pay for the next tier up — it’s a few dollars a month — or move older photos to a drive to make room.

If the photos are already gone

Stop using the device. Every new photo, app install and update can overwrite the space where deleted files still physically sit.

Then check the recycle bin in the photo app, any old phone or SD card still in the house, and whether the photos were ever emailed or shared with anyone — a copy in someone else’s message thread has saved plenty of families.

Recovery from a phone or a card is often possible, but the odds drop the longer the device is used.

Setting up a second copy takes about twenty minutes. Recovering lost photos takes longer, costs more, and doesn’t always work.