What Would Actually Happen If You Lost Everything on Your Phone Tonight

Photos feel handled.

You have iCloud. Maybe Google Photos too. The little cloud icon shows up and you assume everything is safe. You stop thinking about it.

I did the same thing for years.

Then I sat down and tried to answer one basic question. Where are my photos, really?

Here is the part most people never hear until something goes sideways. iCloud is a sync. Not a backup.

Those two words sound similar. They are not the same thing.

A sync means your phone and iCloud stay in perfect agreement. Whatever is on your phone is in iCloud. Whatever gets deleted from your phone gets deleted from iCloud too. You usually get a small recovery window. Then it is gone.

That is convenient. It is also fragile in the exact ways normal life is fragile.

And it matters most for the photos you could never replace. Your kid’s first steps. The blurry picture of a handwritten recipe. The ones of someone who is no longer here.

Those are not files. They are the record of your life.

This week on Substack I walk through three steps that fix it. About ten minutes total.

Your photos are safer before you go to bed tonight.

Read it here →