Most backup advice is really about surviving a single bad afternoon: a dropped laptop, a stolen bag, a drive that clicks instead of spinning up. That kind of advice is correct and worth following. But it quietly assumes something that stops being true once you're planning on a 20-year timescale — that if a copy of your files still exists somewhere, you're fine.
Over 20 years, "the copy still exists" and "the copy still works" come apart. Storage media wears out even sitting on a shelf. File formats fall out of default support. Companies that hosted your backup get acquired, pivot, or shut down. None of that is a hypothetical about the future — it has already happened, more than once, within a timeframe shorter than the one you're planning for.
Things that have already gone obsolete inside one adult lifetime
This isn't ancient history. Someone reading this graduated high school, went to college, and had kids in the time it took the following to go from "the normal way to store files" to "a specialty recovery problem":
- Floppy disks and early optical media. 3.5" floppies were a completely standard way to move files in the 1990s; finding a working drive to read one today is a genuine project. Early CD-Rs and DVD-Rs have a well-documented failure mode called "disc rot," where the reflective or dye layer degrades over 10-20 years regardless of how carefully the disc was stored — meaning some of the very first generation of home-burned photo backups are already failing on a shelf, untouched, having done nothing wrong.
- Proprietary camera RAW formats. Early digital cameras and some scanner software saved images in formats specific to that manufacturer or that exact application. When the software is discontinued, opening the file can mean hunting down an old version of a program that no longer runs on a current operating system.
- Discontinued cloud services. Photo and file-sharing services have opened, grown a loyal user base, and shut down (with an export window, if you were lucky and paying attention) inside spans well under 20 years. A cloud copy is only as durable as the company operating it, and companies are not multi-decade guarantees.
Prints, for what it's worth, have an odd advantage here: a physical photograph doesn't need a compatible drive, a working piece of software, or a company to still be in business in order to be looked at. It just needs light. That's not an argument against digitizing — it's a reminder of what digital backups have to work harder to replicate: something that keeps meaning "photo" no matter what changes around it.
The actual answer: verify and migrate, on a schedule, not in a crisis
None of this means digital backups are a bad idea — they're still the right tool, and far more practical than prints at family-archive scale. It means "backed up" can't be a one-time event. It has to be a habit with two parts:
- Verification. Periodically — once a year is plenty — actually open the backup. Not just check that the drive mounts or the folder is still there; open several files from different years and confirm they still display correctly. This is the only way to catch a failing drive, a corrupting file, or a fading disc while there's still time to do something about it.
- Migration. When you notice a format or a piece of media aging out — a discontinued app, a drive nearing the end of its typical lifespan, a cloud service winding down — move the files to something current before you're forced to, not after. Migrating on your own schedule, with time to double-check the copy, is a calm afternoon. Migrating because a service announced it's shutting down in 30 days is a scramble, and scrambles are where files get missed.
Boring formats age better than clever ones
Format choice is the other half of this, and the pattern is consistent: the more common and less proprietary a format is, the longer it stays readable, because no single company's decisions can strand it.
| Format type | Examples | Long-term outlook |
|---|---|---|
| Plain, widely adopted | JPEG, TIFF (photos) · MP4/H.264 (video) | Supported by essentially every OS, viewer, and app that exists today; no single vendor controls them |
| Camera RAW | Manufacturer-specific RAW formats | Fine to keep alongside a plain-format copy for extra editing detail; risky as the only copy, since support depends on that manufacturer's software |
| App-proprietary | Formats tied to one discontinued app or service | Unreadable the day the app stops running on current systems, unless you migrate first |
The practical rule: whatever else you keep, make sure a plain-format copy — JPEG or TIFF for stills, MP4 for video — exists somewhere in your backups. It doesn't have to be the only copy. It has to be the one you're confident will still open in 2046.
Why this matters more for family photos than for anything else on your drive
A lost work document is annoying but usually recoverable in spirit — someone can rewrite the report, redo the spreadsheet, reconstruct the presentation from memory and old emails. A lost family photo has no second author. Nobody can recreate what a specific afternoon in 2004 looked like, or reconstruct a grandparent's expression in a photo nobody else took. The stakes on this particular category of files are not the same as the stakes on your tax PDFs, and the backup plan should reflect that difference — not with more anxiety, but with the modest, recurring habit of actually checking.
Where this fits with the rest of your backup plan
This post is about the timescale problem — the fact that "backed up" has to account for change, not just redundancy. Two more specific questions are worth answering separately:
- Where should the copies physically live? Our comparison of external drives, NAS, and cloud storage for photos walks through the tradeoffs of each.
- What's the actual rule for how many copies, and where? Our guide to the 3-2-1 backup rule for family photos covers that directly — it's the redundancy half of a plan that also needs the verification-and-migration habit from this post.
- Still have originals trapped on a phone? Start with our iPhone photo offload guide — getting them onto a drive you own is the first step before any of the above applies.
Redundancy protects you from losing a copy. Verification and migration protect you from keeping a copy that quietly stopped being usable. A real plan needs both, and the second one is the part almost everyone skips, because nothing forces you to notice it's missing until the day you actually need the archive.
FAQ
Do file formats really become unreadable over time?
Yes, and it's already happened within living memory. Early digital cameras and scanners saved images in proprietary formats tied to software that no longer exists or no longer runs on current operating systems. Photos and video aren't exempt just because they're common file types today — they're exempt only for as long as something popular still reads them.
How often should I check on an old backup?
Once a year is enough for most families. Plug the drive in, open a folder from several years back, and confirm a handful of photos actually open. The goal is catching a failing drive or an aging format early, while there's still time to fix it — not a full audit.
Is a backup from 10 years ago still good?
Probably, but you don't actually know until you open it. Ten years is long enough for a drive to be near the end of its typical life, for a format to have fallen out of default support, or for a cloud service to have shut down. An unverified decade-old backup is an assumption, not a confirmed fact.
What file formats age best for photos and video?
Plain, widely adopted formats with no single company controlling them: JPEG and TIFF for photos, MP4 (H.264) for video. Camera RAW and app-proprietary formats are fine as extra detail alongside a plain-format copy, but risky as the only copy.
Isn't the 3-2-1 backup rule enough on its own?
3-2-1 solves for losing a copy — a drive failing, a fire, a theft. It doesn't solve for a copy that still exists but has become unreadable because its format or media aged out. You need both redundancy and periodic verification and migration. See our 3-2-1 rule guide for the redundancy half.