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Backing up your library and setting up storage

Storage is not a backup, and the difference is not pedantry

A backup is a second copy, kept somewhere with a different failure mode. Cloud storage is one copy kept somewhere convenient. The two get used as synonyms because both mean “my photographs are not only on my laptop”, and the distinction only becomes visible at the moment it matters.

Encryption is a good illustration of why. Encryption protects what is inside a file from being read. It says nothing at all about whether the file can be reached — those are different properties, and a service can be excellent at the first while offering you nothing on the second.

What a second copy protects against is a short list, and none of these are exotic:

  • Losing access to the account — a lost credential, a lapsed payment, a locked account.
  • Deleting something and not noticing for months. Undo windows are finite. Regret is not.
  • The provider changing — terms, pricing, ownership, or existence.

None of those are failures of storage. They are the reasons a second copy exists.

The one PhotoLog failure that cannot be undone

This one is specific, and it is stated plainly rather than left for a support conversation.

Your account is unlocked by an account secret, and your keys derive from it. There are three ways back in if you lose it: a Recovery Code shown to you once when you create the account, another device you are still signed in on, or another member of a studio you belong to, who can restore your access to the vaults you share with them.

If you are the only member of a studio, and you lose both your Recovery Code and every device that is still signed in, that studio’s content cannot be recovered — not by you, and not by PhotoLog. No separate copy of those keys is held anywhere, there is no administrative override, and no support process can bring it back. How encryption works states this in full, and it is the single strongest argument for both of the things below: record the Recovery Code somewhere real, and keep a copy of anything irreplaceable outside PhotoLog.

Two cheap mitigations, worth doing on the day you create the account:

  • Keep a second device signed in. A tablet you rarely use is a recovery path.
  • Invite someone you trust into the studio. A studio with two members has a member-assisted recovery path; a studio with one has none.

A rule that survives contact with real life

The classic advice — three copies, on two kinds of media, one of them elsewhere — is sound and almost nobody follows it. A smaller version people do follow:

One copy you use, one copy you control, and the second one is not in the same account as the first.

For most people that is PhotoLog plus an external drive that lives in a drawer, updated when something irreplaceable happens rather than on a schedule nobody keeps. The point is not the number of copies; it is that the second one fails for different reasons than the first.

And a backup you have never restored from is a hypothesis. Once a year, pick one photograph from the oldest part of the second copy and open it.

Bringing your own storage

Some plans let a studio connect its own S3-compatible bucket instead of using PhotoLog’s managed storage. That changes who holds the encrypted bytes and where they sit — you choose the provider and the region, and that choice, with the responsibility that comes with it, is yours rather than PhotoLog’s.

Connecting a bucket is not an import. It does not pull in objects that are already in that bucket, and it does not retroactively encrypt them. It is where new material goes from then on. Bring your own storage covers the setup, and data residency covers where the managed tiers run and what this project can and cannot confirm about them.

And BYOS is still not a backup. A bucket you connected is one copy in one place, exactly as before — a copy you control the location of, which is a different property from a copy that fails independently. If it is the only copy, it is the only copy.