BACKUP · 5 MIN READ
The 3-2-1 backup rule for photos, explained simply
· CloudWink team
Photos are lost in boring ways. A phone drowns, a laptop drive fails, an account is closed. The 3-2-1 rule is the simplest plan that survives all of them.
The rule.
Professional photographers have used it for decades.
- 3 copies of every photo you care about.
- 2 different kinds of storage, such as a computer drive and a cloud service.
- 1 copy off-site, away from your home.
A practical setup.
Your phone holds copy one while the photos are recent. A cloud library that keeps originals is copy two, and it is automatically off-site. An external drive at home, updated every few months, is copy three.
If the phone is lost, the cloud has everything. If the cloud account has a problem, the drive has everything. If the house floods, the cloud still does.
Sync is not backup.
A synced folder mirrors deletions. If you delete a photo by mistake on one device, sync deletes it everywhere. A backup keeps its own copy. Look for a service with a trash or recovery window, and keep one copy that is not synced at all.
Where CloudWink fits.
CloudWink works well as your off-site copy. It stores originals without compression, checks each upload on arrival, and keeps deleted files in Trash for 30 days before removing them.
We say this plainly in our terms: no storage service, including ours, should be the only copy of something irreplaceable. Keep one more.
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