How to back up wedding photos so you keep them

Your wedding photographs exist in three or four places right now and every one of them is temporary. A gallery link that expires. A phone that will be replaced. A cloud account you have not looked at the quota of in two years.

Fixing that is one evening of work and it is the only chore from the wedding that gets harder the longer you leave it, because links expire and people delete things. Here is the version that fits one wedding.

How to back up wedding photos: three copies, two kinds of place

The rule people who do this professionally use is called 3-2-1: three copies of anything you care about, on two different kinds of storage, with one of them somewhere else physically. It sounds like overkill for a wedding and it is exactly right for one, because a wedding is the largest irreplaceable thing most people will ever own as a file.

In practice that is your computer, an external drive, and a cloud account you pay for. The drive covers the cloud account being closed, cancelled or emptied. The cloud covers the flat being burgled, flooded or burnt. Two of the three failures that actually destroy photographs are physical and local, and no amount of syncing helps with those.

You do not need to do this for everything you own. You need to do it once, for one folder, in the month after the wedding.

First, get everything down at full size

This is the step people skip and it is the one that matters. A copy you cannot open without logging in somewhere is not a copy.

Download the professional gallery the week it arrives. Photographers host galleries on services that expire, often after six or twelve months, and the sentence that ends badly is always the same: the couple assumed it would be there. Take the full resolution download, not the web sized one, and check the file sizes look like several megabytes each rather than a few hundred kilobytes.

Then get your own phone's copies down at original size, which is not what you get by dragging thumbnails out of a browser. Apple documents how to download iCloud photos and videos in full resolution, and the equivalent exists on Android. And if the wedding had a shared gallery, download the whole thing as an archive while it is open rather than a photograph at a time.

Put all of it in one folder with the date in the name. One folder is what makes every later step a single drag rather than a project.

How much space this actually needs

People put this off partly because they assume it is expensive. It is worth doing the arithmetic, because for almost everybody the answer is that one drive covers it with room left over.

A full resolution wedding photograph out of a modern camera is commonly somewhere between five and fifteen megabytes, so a gallery of eight hundred is roughly four to twelve gigabytes. Guest photographs from phones are smaller individually and there are more of them, which tends to land in the same order of magnitude. If your photographer also gives you the untouched camera files, that alone can be several times the size of the finished set, so ask rather than assume.

Video is the part that surprises people. A few minutes of phone video can outweigh every photograph from the day put together, and a videographer's delivery is larger again. If there was video at your wedding, size the drive for the video and the photographs will look like a rounding error beside it.

So the practical answer is a portable drive in the hundreds of gigabytes, which is an unremarkable purchase, and a paid cloud tier at the smallest step above free. Neither is worth agonising over and both cost less than one of the things you already bought for the day.

Sync is not a backup, and a full account can delete things

This is the trap, and it catches careful people. Photo services synchronise: whatever you do on one device happens everywhere. That is a feature until the thing you did was delete a folder, or hand the phone to a child, and then it faithfully copies the mistake to every copy you own within seconds.

The quota is the other half. A free Google account has fifteen gigabytes shared across Drive, Gmail and Photos, which a wedding will fill on its own, and Google's own page says that an account left over quota for two years may have its content deleted across all three. Nobody plans to be over quota for two years. People are, because the warnings arrive in the mailbox that is full.

So a cloud account is a fine second copy and a bad only copy. The distinction to hold on to is that a backup is a copy that does not change when the original does.

The drive, and the one somewhere else

A portable drive large enough for a wedding costs less than the flowers did. Copy the folder onto it, then unplug it and put it in a drawer. A drive left permanently connected is exposed to the same accident, the same power surge and the same ransomware as the computer it is plugged into.

The third copy needs to be in a different building, and the easiest version is a paid cloud account with the folder uploaded once. The second easiest, and genuinely fine, is a second drive that lives at your parents' house. Update it at Christmas. Nothing about your wedding is going to change.

Then check it. Six months later, open two or three files from each copy and look at them. An unverified backup is a belief, and the way people find out theirs was a belief is the day they need it.

Do it in the first fortnight

The window is short for a reason that has nothing to do with discipline. Guests still remember they meant to send you things. Gallery links are still live. The professional set is either arriving or still a few weeks out, and a folder that already exists is easy to add to. Six months later every one of those is harder.

This is also the honest answer to how long any shared gallery needs to stay open, which we wrote about in more detail elsewhere. A gallery is where photographs are collected, not where they live for thirty years. Ours included. Download the archive, back it up properly, and then the expiry date stops being a question you have to think about again.