Not which app you look at them in. Where are they. 📷
This is the one I ask that makes a room go quiet, because almost everybody has an answer they are about sixty percent confident in, and sixty percent is a strange number to be about the only pictures of your grandmother.
Sixty percent confident is an unusual thing to be about the only photographs of your grandmother.
The thing nobody explains 🌥️
There is a difference between where you see something and where it is kept, and every app on your phone works very hard to blur it.
Your photos app shows you everything. Some of those files are on the phone. Some are on a service. Some are on the phone as a small preview of something that only fully exists on the service. It all looks identical in the grid, which is exactly the design, and it is the reason people delete a thing in one place and are surprised somewhere else.
So when I ask where they live, I am not testing you. I am asking a question the software has actively made hard to answer.
Why one copy is not a copy
If everything is on the phone only, the phone is the whole archive. If everything is on one service only, that account is the whole archive — and accounts get locked, cards expire, and recovery emails belong to a job you left.
One copy anywhere is one event away from none. And the event is never dramatic. It is a pool at a cookout, or an expired card, or a login that went with a laptop you gave back. 🏊🏾♀️
Don't get it twisted, this is not about being disorganised. Nobody is disorganised about their photographs. They just never got told that the grid was hiding a question.
One copy anywhere is one event away from none, and the event is never dramatic.
What good enough looks like
Two places, one of which is not in your house or your hand. That is the whole standard, and it is much lower than people expect.
In practice: a cloud service you actually pay for, so it does not quietly stop at five gigabytes, plus one other copy — a drive in a drawer is completely acceptable. Not elegant. Completely acceptable.
And once a year, open the second copy and look at something in it. A backup nobody has ever opened is a belief, not a backup.
The takeaway
Twenty minutes this weekend. Find out how much space you are actually using and whether you are paying for enough of it. That single number answers most of this.
Everything else in this series can be fixed later. This one cannot, and that is the only reason I am asking you to do it now rather than when you get to it. 🤍
Want the full read on what else in your setup has only one copy? Start here: Discover