How to back up
family photos.

Three copies, because any one copy can fail. Two kinds of storage, which in US-CERT’s words protects “against different types of hazards”. One copy off-site, because a fire, flood or burglary takes everything in the building. If your photos are still scattered, start with our guide to organising family photos.

Photos like this one, from the family of Ancestorii’s founder, cannot be taken again. That is the whole case for three copies.

Use more than one kind. Each has a weakness the others cover.

Nobody can tell you how long your particular drive will last. The New York State Archives puts it plainly: some media remain readable for a long time, others fail within a few years, and there is no certain way to know which you have.

What we do have are failure rates. Backblaze, a cloud storage company that publishes data on the drives in its data centres, recorded an annualised failure rate of 1.36% across 344,196 hard drives in 2025, down from 1.55% in 2024. That is roughly one or two failures for every hundred drives running for a year. Low, but not zero.

Discs vary even more. The Canadian Conservation Institute estimates that recordable discs last anywhere from a couple of years to more than 200, depending on the type: on average 10 to 20 years for a typical silver DVD-R, 5 to 10 years for most recordable Blu-ray discs, and over 100 years for the best gold CD-Rs. Ignore its advice on choosing, recording, handling and storing discs, and one can fail in as little as 2 to 10 years. Our guide to how long photos last covers prints too.

iCloud Photos and Google Photos are very good at keeping your library the same on every device, which is exactly why they are not a second copy. Apple says that when you delete photos on one device, they are deleted everywhere you use iCloud Photos, and after 30 days in Recently Deleted they are gone for good. Google says a backed-up photo deleted in Google Photos is removed from every device with backup turned on. Apple even tells you to keep backup copies of your library, because iCloud Photos is not duplicated in your iCloud backup.

Accounts come with rules, too:

None of this makes the cloud a bad idea. It makes it one copy, not the plan. US-CERT adds a quieter risk: backups that update themselves can silently copy corruption or malware from the original files to the backup, which is a good reason for at least one copy that does not update automatically.

Check once a year and refresh every three to five years. The Library of Congress recommends checking your photos at least once a year to make sure you can still read them, and making new copies every five years or when needed. The New York State Archives suggests copying files from older media to newer media every three to five years, because the risk of failure rises with each year that passes.

The yearly check can be quick: plug in each drive and open a handful of photos from different years, confirm the cloud backup ran recently, add the year’s new photos to every copy, and note the date.

A perfect backup that only one person can find is not much use to the family. The Library of Congress suggests putting a copy of your photo inventory with your important papers in a secure place. Write down where each copy is and which accounts hold photos, and tell at least one other person.

Apple lets you add a Legacy Contact, who can request access to your Apple Account data after your death, including photos and device backups. Google’s Inactive Account Manager lets you choose up to 10 people to receive data from your account if it becomes inactive. Our guide to what happens to your photos when you die goes further.

Ancestorii is not a backup service, and it shouldn’t be treated as one. It is where your family’s chosen photos live with their stories, dates and voices, in a private space everyone you invite can see and add to. Storing photos and keeping them are different jobs, as our guide to living libraries and digital vaults explains.

It can be one more place your best photos are kept, off your own devices. But keep your full set of originals in your own 3-2-1 backups: iPhone HEIC photos are converted to JPEG when they upload, so the copy in Ancestorii is not the original file, and each plan has a file-size allowance (20 MB per file on Free, 10 GB on Premium).

Storage is one shared pool for the family: 1 GB on the Free plan and 100 GB on Premium, which costs £3.99 a month per family, paid monthly. If you stop Premium, nothing is deleted: everything stays viewable, and only new uploads beyond the Free limits stop. See pricing for details.