Camera or smartphone, it does not matter. Storing your photos locally, either with internal storage or expandable memory (SD), makes your digital memories vulnerable to theft and data loss. After all, electronics can break and malfunction. Worse, people can steal them from you, leaving you without a means to recover those precious photos.

Where to Backup Your Photos

At the end of each vacation day, go through your photos and select those you wish to protect. While you could simply select them all, you may find filtering a good tactic. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a passel of photos that no one wants to look through.

Now that you’ve got a refined bank of photos to backup, you can choose any of the following methods. Note that most require a data connection for uploading, so log onto your hotel’s Wi-fi or visit a nearby café to complete the backup process.

USB or External Hard Drive

You can download your photos to a laptop and transfer them onto a memory card, USB or hard drive for safe keeping. You may even want to save copies to the laptop itself for easy viewing later.

Cloud Storage

There are myriad cloud storage services available for saving files securely and remotely. For example, here are two popular ones:

• Google Drive—a free storage account includes 15 gigabytes across the Google Drive, Gmail and Google Photos platforms.
• Dropbox—a basic account with Dropbox includes two free gigabytes of space.

The benefit of using either service above is that you can upload directly from your device with free apps. Alternatively, you can also upload to your favourite social media channels. There are no limits on Facebook, for example, but you should adjust your privacy settings if there are photos you’d rather not share publicly (or even with friends and family).

As a final resort, you can email yourself photo attachments. However, this is the most tedious method because email clients have maximum attachment sizes, meaning you will need to send batch messages or shrink your images.