Is iCloud Photos or Google Photos actually a backup?

The word "backup" is used loosely in phone marketing, and the confusion it creates is expensive. When a photo service says your photos are "safe in the cloud", what it means is that they exist in one place that you can reach from several devices. That is genuinely useful — a dropped phone no longer means lost photographs — but it is protection against one failure only, and not the failure that catches most people.

Safety

Step by step

1. Understand what sync guarantees.A synced library keeps every device showing the same set of photographs. Add on one, it appears on the rest. Edit on one, the edit appears on the rest. Delete on one, it disappears from the rest. The guarantee is sameness, not preservation.
2. Understand what a backup guarantees.A backup holds a copy taken at a point in time, in a place the live library cannot modify. Change or lose something in the live library and the backup still has what it had. That one-directional relationship is the entire definition.
3. Name the failure each one protects against.Sync protects against losing or breaking a device. Backup protects against losing the data itself — deletion, corruption, an account you can no longer get into, a subscription that lapses, or a service that changes its terms. Most photo loss is the second kind.
4. Check which one you actually have.Ask a single question: if I delete a photo on my phone right now, and the phone syncs, is there still a copy somewhere that nobody can reach from the phone? If the answer is no, you have sync and no backup, however many devices display your library.
5. Add one copy that does not sync back.The simplest version for most people is an external drive holding an exported copy of the library, updated once or twice a year and then unplugged. Unplugged is doing real work here: a drive that is always connected and always mirroring has the same weakness as the cloud.
6. Keep the sync as well.This is not an argument against cloud photo services. Keep the sync for convenience and device loss, and add the archive for everything else. Two different protections against two different failures.
7. Verify the archive once, properly.Open the exported copy on a computer, count roughly, open a handful of files from different years, and confirm videos play. An export that silently produced thumbnails or skipped a year is worse than no export, because you will trust it.

Tips

• "Shared with you" and shared albums do not count as your copy. If the person who shared them deletes them or closes their account, they leave your library too.
• A computer photo app signed into the same account is usually part of the mirror, not outside it. Check whether it is set to keep its own originals; if it is emptying its bin in step with the phone, it is another face of the same copy.
• Printed photographs and photo books are, unglamorously, the most durable backup most households own. They survive every kind of account failure.
• If you only ever do one thing from this page: export the years that matter to a drive, unplug it, and put it somewhere other than next to the computer.

Common mistakes

• Deleting from the phone to free space, believing the cloud copy is separate — It is not separate. In a synced library the phone and the cloud are two views of one set. The deletion is applied to the set.
• Counting several devices as several copies — Four devices showing a synced library are four windows onto one library. A deletion propagates to all four, usually within minutes.
• Assuming the recently-deleted album is a safety net that lasts — It is a grace period of a set number of days, published by the service and typically around a month. It expires quietly, and it does not help with a loss you notice a year later.

Questions people ask