Journal
Your guide to offline backup, the 3-2-1 rule, and getting photos and videos off your phone and onto a drive you control.
The format of your USB drive decides whether your phone can write to it and whether long videos will copy at all. Why exFAT is the right choice, when FAT32 bites, and how to reformat.
Nearly every Android phone can read and write a USB drive directly, thanks to USB OTG. What OTG is, what you need, how to find and remove the drive, and what you can do with it.
With iCloud Photos, many of your originals live in iCloud, not on your phone. Three ways to get them onto a USB drive without a computer, and what each is like for a whole library.
You can keep a real backup of your phone photos without handing them to a cloud provider. What to switch off, what to watch for, and where the copy should live instead.
Yes — every iPhone since iOS 13 can read and write a USB drive through the Files app. Which cable or adapter you need, which formats work, what you can do with it, and what to try when the drive won't show up.
Optimize iPhone Storage is on by default with iCloud Photos, and it quietly moves your original photos off the phone. What it does, how to tell, and what it means when you want a backup.
A physical copy of your photos is only as good as the drive you choose, where you keep it, and whether it still works when you need it. How to get all three right.
Without a computer, an iPhone backup has two halves: the device and the photo library. iCloud Backup covers the first and has a blind spot for the second. Here is how to cover both.
Cloud and USB backups protect you from different disasters. What each is good at, where each fails, and why the strongest setup uses both.
Android can copy folders to a USB drive by itself, and does it better than iPhone can. Here is where the manual route still falls short, and what changes with a dedicated backup app.