I don’t delete my photos from the device I received or took them on, until they’re committed to my main long-term storage solution, plus at least 1 of its mirrors.
My photos are organised in a hierarchy of folders/directories on my desktop computer’s second hard drive. The naming convention for the folders is “YYYY-MM-DD_optional_description”, so that when browsing the folders, the photos are grouped chronologically with a little note of where they were taken or who I was with.
I use rsync (you could use robocopy if you’re a Windows user) to synchronise new and changed files to some external hard disks and a NAS. Therefore, the external hard disks, and my NAS, look identical to my desktop computer’s data drive when viewed in a file manager.
At least one of the hard disks is stored at another location (my Mum’s house).
Having read the privacy policy of many cloud services, I choose not to use them. Most automatic backup solutions wouldn’t work for me because I refuse to use Google, Apple or Microsoft’s offerings, and additionally Dropbox is not libre software. I do however use a Nextcloud instance (provided by my Disroot account). My main issues with cloud services are that none of them had enough storage at a reasonable price last time I checked, and even if they did, transferring data over the internet is far too slow. I’ve been taking digital photos for 26 years, and digital videos nearly as long, so that’s a lot of GB to transfer even over fast broadband. The initial upload would take ages.
My other issue with cloud services is that they are easily hacked (and often are), plus you surrender your data to others. There’s no such thing as “the cloud”, just other people’s computers. If any cloud service decides I can no longer have access to my photos, I lose them. A friend of mine recently lost his Google account, because (like me) he signs out of things when he’s done. Upon signing back in, he was asked to confirm his registered phone number, and asked security questions, but despite this (and knowing a long and complicated password), this apparently wasn’t enough to verify it was him. He couldn’t receive a message to his phone because he had changed number. He couldn’t verify the login from another device, because he didn’t stay logged-in anywhere else. There’s no way to contact a human being at Google. Therefore, if he’d been using GDrive, he’d have lost all his photos.
Similarly, a lot of service providers exert too much control over your data. A musician friend of mine had several of his own covers of songs on his Apple device, and some MP3s of rare versions of tracks. Apple’s software read the ID3 tags from the songs and “helpfully” removed them from his device because those songs are available in the itunes store. Unfortunately, the versions in the Apple store are all the regular studio-versions of the songs, so he almost lost irreplaceable recordings. I think Apple now reserve the right to scan all your photos for porn or something like that. I’d hate for some algorithm to mistakenly flag some of my pictures and then accuse me of some crime or delete my data - all without human oversight or correction.
Therefore I’d say, add cloud storage if you like - it’s convenient and cheap, but don’t rely on it. As the old saying goes, it’s not a backup til it’s redundant, offline and off-site.
