Stop Spending on Cloud Storage: There’s a Much Cheaper Way to Back Up Photos and Videos

When your phone is active little storage spacechances are it’s because of all your photos and videos. You can always just upload everything to the cloud, but do you really want to pay for iCloud or Google One every month?

Cloud storage used to be inexpensive. When Google Photos debuted in 2015, it promised free, unlimited storage. I happily uploaded all my photos and videos knowing they were safely in the cloud and accessible from anywhere.

Then Google pulled the rug out from under us in 2021. The free ride was over. All those thousands of photos were safe, but every new photo started taking away that measly 15 GB of free storage space. Suddenly my photography habit came at a price, requiring me to pay for a Google One subscription if I wanted to keep uploading.

All those photos and videos took up a lot of space, because what’s stored in the cloud doesn’t really disappear into thin air. These files exist on physical servers here on Earth. Essentially they are stored on someone else’s computer.

And now I had to use that storage space. I’ve always hated the idea of ​​paying for monthly subscriptions: $10 a month becomes $120 a year, which becomes $1200 after 10 years.

And Google One wasn’t a subscription I could just cancel, like Netflix or Spotify. If I stopped paying, I wouldn’t be able to upload new photos and videos anymore, and that might be the case losing access to all my files after two years.

How can I backup all my memories without the cloud?

Over the years I have developed a system that allows me to manage my files and keep copies on an external hard drive. While it does take a bit more work to transfer everything manually, it’s a better long-term solution for me and I don’t have to rely on paying for a subscription service.

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Why I use an external hard drive to store photos and videos

If you don’t want to pay for cloud storage, you may be tempted to buy a phone with a higher storage capacity. After Google Photos stopped letting me upload files for free, my first thought was that I would rather pay more upfront for a device with a terabyte of storage instead of paying for a Google One subscription indefinitely.

But even the most future-proof 1TB phone will eventually need to be replaced. And if I want to transfer all my old files, my next phone will need at least as much storage as my current one, plus extra capacity for my future photos and videos.

To further complicate this problem, image file sizes continue to increase. As phone cameras improve, the images they capture result in higher megapixel files.

My iPhone estimates that each 12 megapixel image is about 2 MB and each 24 megapixel image is 3 MB. Video takes up even more space: a minute of 4K footage can easily exceed 1 GB. At these rates, even a phone with 256GB of storage (the new minimum for the iPhone 17 series) can fill up quickly.

Digital storage on an external drive doesn’t have to be expensive. You can easily get a 1TB SSD drive for under $100. (For context, Apple charges $1,399 for the 1TB iPhone Air, a $400 premium over the $999 256GB model.)

The best part of using an external drive is that you can store files on multiple devices. You can also continue using it long after you upgrade to a new phone. In general, HDDs last three to five years, while SSDs last at least five years.

Using an external drive requires more effort than backing everything up to the cloud. You need to wait for your files to be transferred from your device to the drive and then sort everything into folders. Once the file transfer is complete, you will then need to delete these files from your phone or computer.

Fortunately, once you get the hang of the process and have done it a few times, it becomes quite simple. Here’s how I do it.

My process for backing up photos

When I need to back up my photos and videos (or when my phone is running out of storage space), I like to make two copies of each file: one for my laptop and one for my external SSD.

My MacBook runs fewer apps and has more storage than my iPhone, so it receives a copy of all the photos and videos from my phone. The Photos app on my Mac also has a handy “Delete items after upload” checkbox, which I recommend selecting.

Once all the files are transferred, I connect my external drive to my computer and select all the photos I want to back up. The Photos app conveniently sorts everything by upload date. I can select all the images from the latest batch by clicking the first photo, holding down the Shift key, and then clicking the last photo. Then I drag them to the external drive. If I have a lot of photos (more than 500) I tend to split this step and select 200 to 300 at a time, otherwise there may be some interruptions in the transfer process.

I try to back up my photos at least once a month, or after a special occasion like a vacation. To be on the safe side, I sometimes also backup before a major software update (such as iOS 26). The process has become a way for me to mark the end of one period and the beginning of another.

I always had trouble organizing the files on my external drive. However, I now simply create a folder for each batch of uploaded photos and videos. I label these folders by date (e.g. July 2025) or by the occasion (trip to London, summer 2024).

A similar system may work for you. You may choose more or less frequent backups. Anyway, I highly recommend this last step: back up the backup to a separate external drive. That way if one of your drives fails, you still have the other one.

I am more conscious of the images I capture

One problem with keeping all my files on external drives is that I can’t always access them. But I think that’s a reasonable trade-off. I don’t have to carry in my pocket every image I’ve ever made. I can usually find the photos I need on my Instagram page or in my email inbox.

I leave certain photos and videos on my phone indefinitely, but only the photos and videos I need to reference frequently (for example, a screenshot of my insurance information). I also keep some photos that I like to see every now and then: an image of a family reunion, a day out with friends. It’s a curated collection, similar to the one or two images people used to keep in their wallets.

Yes, it can be a pain to manage all those files on an external drive, but it’s well worth the extra effort. Not only do I spend less money in the long run, but I also feel reassured that my memories are stored on a physical object I own, rather than dumped on someone else’s computer.

Even if I paid for Google One or another cloud storage option, I would feel like someone else owned my files. What if Google Photos makes another change to its storage policy or increases prices again? I would have no choice but to go along with it. My memories would be at the mercy of a corporation. And what if Google shuts down one day? In fact, it is currently one of the largest companies in the world. But so did Kodaknot so long ago.

There’s another unexpected benefit: being responsible for creating these manual backups has made me more deliberate about capturing images in the first place. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t need to take a photo of everything I see. Most of the time I can just remember.