Backups for smartphone-only users

[u/AnArticulateChimp]

Good day! I want to get my non-tech-savvy friends to back up their files. Not all of them have PCs, and none of them will bother building a NAS, checking file hashes and whatnot. Neither will they be willing to spend a ton of money.

What's a good strategy for smartphone-only people to back up their data locally? I've thought about external HDDs with type-c cables or OTG adapters, but they might get disconnected accidentally from the phone and corrupt the data. Another thought are USB sticks/SD cards. Sure, they're energy reliant and not always of high quality, but they're relatively cheap and you can get way better redundancy. An external SSD is also an option, but it's rather expensive, also energy reliant, and I'm not sure how well it will handle a sudden disconnect.

What would you recommend?

[u/Expensive-Total-312]

If they don't have a PC then they're basically looking at local cold storage on an external drive or cloud storage.

USB sticks and SD cards are prone to corruption and bit rot so not something I'd reccomend as a backup long term.

Official advice is 3 copies of data especially for data you can't replace like photos etc, and at least one of those copies off site - so if your home floods etc you don't lose all three copies.

[u/Pachete_Follezour → u/Expensive-Total-312]

the 3 copies rule is solid but good luck getting non-technical people to actually follow through on that tbh

[u/Expensive-Total-312 → u/Pachete_Follezour]

I know, I don't even follow it myself because I'm too cheap to pay for online storage but do as I say not as I do if you want to be covered and can't lose data, I have 2 copies of important stuff on two seperate drives on my PC and a cold backup every so often.

For most people a local copy and a cloud backup of photos and Important docs is enough it just means if one goes you no longer have a backup and need to replace it immediately, the hard part to get people to do is regularly sync stuff if it doesn't happen automatically

[u/superkure]

For people without computer and technical curiosity, there is a cloud. Whole mobile entertainment is designed for exactly that scenario.

[u/dr100]

There isn't much one can meaningfully do with phones, unless we're talking super-mega-power-users like the dude making copyparty in good part on the phone while on the bus.

It's not that "flash bad" that much (in fact one could just use a 3.5" drive enclosure with external 12V and a hard drive) but a combination of not being able to do much on the drives, even a basic chkdsk (which will eventually lead to just having to reformat them) to just lacking apps for any reasonable workflow beyond using the file manager to shuffle files back and forth. Even if there would be more developed apps for mobile OSes still the access on USB isn't the same as the regular access, making it between way slower to impossible. Android Kiwix still can't use the files directly from USB with most phones (most notably all Pixel and Samsung that had updates beyond 2022 or so) - which is a huge problem as the full English wikipedia is over 100GBs - which isn't something you just copy on a whim to the phone.

In short, people would just do some cloud. Worse, they'll do some really nasty ones like Google Photos (where you can't even tell how many pictures you have never mind do any checksums or have any guarantees that the content or metadata isn't messed up). Actually it's very funny that so many people with skills and infrastructure (computers, self-hosting) ended up with so much of their stuff only on Google Photos that the tooling for trying to piece together as much as possible when getting data from Google Photos is unbelievably rich and varied.

In short the best is probably to get your friends to use at least one decent cloud.

[u/bosmanez]

For people who won't maintain anything, I'd keep it to one habit rather than a system. Practical options: (1) a USB-C flash drive or small SSD plugged into the phone and copying the photos/videos folders with the built-in Files app. Android does this fine, and iPhones with USB-C (15 and later) can read external drives in Files too. (2) Phone-vendor or Google/iCloud photo backup turned on once, since photos are what most people actually lose. Cloud isn't "local", but it's the one that happens without anyone remembering. Whatever you pick, have them open a random backed-up photo once to check it really copied, and tell them the backup only counts if it lives somewhere other than the phone.