Bushfire crisis: How bushfire victims could recover lost photos from cloud services
Almost 2000 homes have been lost in Australia’s tragic summer of bushfires but victims may still be able to recover lost photo albums from digital backups.
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Bushfire victims may still be able to recover parts of their lost photo albums, with research showing two in five Australians have employed online services to back up their digital memories.
And experts say the images could be easy to rescue, even if you’ve long since logged out an app or stopped paying for a backup service.
New South Wales and Victorian officials estimated almost 2000 homes have been destroyed in this year’s horror bushfire season, with hundreds more damaged by fires.
Despite the devastation, Telsyte managing director Foad Fadaghi said bushfire victims may still be able to recover any memories lost if they had been stored digitally to a cloud service.
Telsyte’s Digital Consumer Study found forty per cent Australians over the age of 16 used internet-connected services to store their information, and storing photos was their most popular use.
“Most people keep photos on their devices, on hard drives, but there are many using the cloud. These are digital assets,” Mr Fadaghi said.
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Bushfire victims who have lost their homes, and the photo albums inside, could potentially recover some digital memories from these services, he said.
And they may be able to download the images even if they had stopped paying storage fees.
Services including Apple’s iCloud, Microsoft’s OneDrive and Dropbox, for example, will let users access all of the photos they’ve uploaded to the company’s servers even after they’ve stopped paying for storage.
The images will still be available to download and edit; users simply can’t add more until they rejoin the service.
Other free services, such as Google Photos, may have been activated on a device and set to backup photos as far back as 2015.
The app can backup photos in the background on Android devices and may have quietly stored victims’ memories to their Google accounts.
And, as a last resort, social networks such as Flickr, Instagram and Facebook allow users to download large digital photo albums at once in single files.
FIVE WAYS TO RECOVER LOST PHOTOGRAPHS
• Google Photos: Introduced in 2015, this service automatically backs up photos and videos from Google Android and Apple iOS devices, and is free if you use Google’s compressed ‘high quality’ setting. Users can check if they activated the service from their Gmail account.
• Apple iCloud: Useful for anyone with an iPhone, iPad, iPod or Mac, Apple will give you 5GB storage free to upload photos and documents. You can pay for more storage and, even if you’ve stopped subscribing to the service, Apple will keep storing the photos you uploaded while you were a financial member.
• Dropbox: One of the early cloud services, Dropbox now offers 2GB of free storage but, like Apple, it will keep your uploads safe even after you’ve stopped paying for the service. The company also offered generous free upload allowances on smartphones years ago that might have saved many photos.
• Microsoft OneDrive: Microsoft gives its users 5GB of free storage for photos and files but Samsung users may have taken up an offer of 100GB storage last year or earlier. The personal cloud storage service is available from smartphones and PCs alike.
• Flickr, Instagram, Facebook: While you won’t get full-resolution copies of your images from these social networking sites, you can download them all in a digital file. Flickr will let users download albums into a .zip file, for example, while Instagram and Facebook will send you a complete copy of your photos after selecting the “request download” option.