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In a digital world, preserving information is everyone's problem. Last week the UK government told businesses they should have contingency plans on paper in case of cyber-attacks. And just days ago, a problem with Amazon Web Services disrupted more than 1,000 businesses globally. Christopher Barnatt, a former computing and future studies lecturer and YouTuber, says this is why we should think about making physical copies of all important documents - for example birth certificates, insurance papers and passports. Photos are arguably no different. And there are plenty of tools we can use to protect them. What caused the AWS outage - and why did it make the internet fall apart?Amazon Web Services outage: Are we relying too much on US big tech? One obvious step is to back them up onto an online cloud service like Apple's iCloud or Google Photos. Smartphones often do this automatically. But there are issues like space and cost. iCloud has a limit of 5GB - which covers photos as well as iPhone backups and other app data. After that, it charges UK users £0.99 per month for up to 50GB of space. Google Photos offers 15GB - shared with the user's Gmail and Google Drive content - before charging. While these services are very stable, they are not totally risk-free. Earlier this year, a woman in North Carolina told the WBTV news outlet that her iCloud account was hacked and her password was changed. She lost access to her photos and videos and said Apple told her there was nothing they could do about it. You don't have to be hacked though. If you're really unlucky you might forget your password and be unable to restore it - meaning you can't log back into your cloud service.
