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Turn on phone backup and check it ran
A lost or broken phone costs you a phone, not your photos and messages.
Why it matters: A lost, stolen or dead phone takes its photos and messages with it unless they are backed up. This is the five-minute version; the photos-and-memories steps build the copy you control.
Do it
- On iPhone, open Settings, tap your name, then iCloud, then iCloud Backup, and turn on Back Up This iPhone.
- On Android, open Settings, tap Google or Google services, then All services, then Backup, and turn it on.
- Check that photos are included and that you have enough storage for them.
- Look at the date of the last successful backup on every phone in the house.
Say this: If my phone says it hasn't backed up lately, I plug it in on Wi-Fi tonight and let it run.
Check it worked: Every phone in the house backs up automatically, and each one shows a successful backup from the past few days.
Simply put
A backup is like a photocopy of the family album kept in another room. If the phone is lost, dropped or dies, the copy is still there, and you can load it onto a new phone.
In detail
A cloud backup in the same account as your photos is one copy, not two: if that account is locked, deleted or taken over, the backup goes with it. That's why memories-second-copy exists.
As a story
Your phone slips out of your pocket on the bus, and it's gone by the time you notice. Years of photos were on it, including your daughter's first day of school.
At home, you sign in to Find My or Find My Device on your laptop and mark the phone as lost, so it locks. You turned on backup last month and checked that it ran, so you sign in on a replacement phone and restore the latest backup.
By bedtime your photos and messages are back, first-day pictures included. You tell your carrier the phone is gone, put the new one on charge and go to bed.
If this is new to you: Will this delete anything? No. A backup copies the phone and leaves it as it is. Then just check the date of the last backup.
Points toward the Long View: photos and messages that outlive any single phone.