Are you storing your photos in the right way? — Tip #13

You may be surprised how frequently folks wake up to corrupted files ☠️

Today, we’re moving into the digital realm. I’ve noticed that many of you enjoy the financial content (well, can’t blame you) and the more technical pieces too (maybe because I’m a tech guy? 🤔). I’ll keep this one short and not technical, I promise!

If you’re a millennial like me (or from an earlier generation), you might be used to saving photos on some kind of hard drive, either on your computer or on an external drive. Back in the day, we even stored them on CD/DVD… yeah unbelievable, I know.

Recently, I found an old smartphone of mine. I charged it, switched it on, and surprisingly it still worked (kudos to Sony’s engineering 🇯🇵). While I was checking its contents, I realized I had never made a backup. So I connected the phone to my laptop and extracted all the photos. This is what I found 👇

I didn’t actually save the corrupted photos, so I had to Google an example 🤡

About 90% of the photos on my old phone were corrupted. I was genuinely sad: they were mostly high-school photos and memories I wanted to revisit and share with friends. So I promised myself I wouldn’t make that mistake again 🙏.

Here’s what’s going on (keeping it simple). Most “modern” storage like SSDs, SD cards, and USB sticks use NAND flash memory, which is what makes these devices small and silent. To store data, flash memory essentially keeps electrical charge in tiny cells. Those charge levels are what represent the “0”s and “1”s.

Over long periods without power, that stored charge can slowly leak. When enough “0”s and “1”s drift, parts of your file can change and that’s when corruption can happen. In other words: your photo’s representation in 0s and 1s is no longer the same string that originally encoded the image, so you end up with a mix of “garbage” and your photo… or sometimes a file that won’t open at all.

What’s the best way to tackle this? A few options:

• 🔌 Plug in your SSD drive/USB stick/SD card → If not “permanently” at least once a year (I’d suggest more often) to reduce the risk of long-term data loss.

• 🧲 Store important files on a magnetic drive → Yep, those bulky, slower, noisier ones. They store data magnetically rather than as electrical charge, so long-term “shelf” storage tends to be safer (though they can still fail, so don’t treat them as immortal).

• ☁️ Store files in the cloud → Cloud providers like iCloud (Apple) or Google Drive (Android) handle a lot of durability concerns for you. I’m not a big fan of this because of privacy trade-offs, but it’s a trade-off many people are willing to make. Over the long run, this is also a costlier option.

  • Some folks do a “cloud-ish” version of this for photos by posting everything on Facebook/Instagram. I don’t think that’s a great idea: you’re ultimately at the mercy of those companies 👮.

Personally, I do the following: I store my photos/files on two small SSDs (main + redundancy in case one fails or gets lost), plus iCloud for photos I take “on the go” with my phone since I travel frequently. At the end of each year, I move the important stuff from iCloud and my SSDs onto a magnetic hard drive (HDD) that holds most of my long-term files and photos.

I’d like to improve this setup by adding a backup for that main HDD too but I’ll be honest, it starts to feel like a bit much… even though, as a computer scientist, I know it’s the right thing to do.

Your weekly tip: If you have important photos and files you want to keep long-term, store them on a magnetic hard drive (HDD) in combination with a cloud service. If you prefer convenience and don’t want to spend on cloud costs or value your privacy rely on SSDs, SD cards, or USB sticks but make sure you plug them in regularly.

Don’t forget to share this tip with a friend who takes a lot of pictures 🫰

See you next week, until then…

Don’t Panic 😱