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How to Back Up Your Google Photos Library to a Hard Drive
Google Photos has been my primary method for backing up photos and videos for nearly a decade. I recently had the realization that it would be Very Bad if something ever happened to it, so I finally took the time to back up all my photos to an external hard drive, too.
Of course, I’d heard for years that having one backup is as good as having no backups—especially if that one backup lives in the cloud. But laziness prevented me from taking action. The good news is it’s a lot easier than you might think to copy your entire Google Photos library to a hard drive. I’ll walk you through it.
Why You Should Back Up Google Photos Locally
While Google Photos is incredibly convenient, there are several reasons why it shouldn’t be your only backup solution.
- Offline Access: Google Photos requires an internet connection to view backed-up media. A local backup means you can access your photos and videos anytime, anywhere, even without Wi-Fi.
- Protection Against Account Issues: Losing access to your Google account (due to a forgotten password, a hack, or even a misunderstanding of Google's terms of service) would mean losing access to your Google Photos library as well. You don’t want that to happen.
- Defense Against Data Loss: People have lost years' worth of photos and videos stored in Google Photos with no way of recovering them. While rare, data loss is always a possibility.
There are obviously tons of different external hard drives to choose from. Personally, I opted to buy a USB-C enclosure for a 2TB NVMe M.2 SSD, like this one from UGREEN. This method is a bit cheaper and much easier to upgrade than a standard portable hard drive, but those work perfectly fine, too.
How to Back Up Google Photos to a Hard Drive
You have a few options for getting all of your photos and videos from Google Photos, but the easiest method is Google Takeout. This is Google’s service for requesting your data for any of Google’s apps—including Google Photos.
Google Takeout allows you to export your data directly from Google Photos. It’s straightforward and doesn’t require any third-party tools.
- Open your web browser and navigate to takeout.google.com. Click “Deselect All” at the top of the page, then scroll down and check the box next to "Google Photos."
- You can choose specific albums, but if you want to download everything, leave it at "All photo albums selected.” Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click “Next step.”
- Next, we’re going to choose how you get the files. You have the option to "Send download link via email" or have them uploaded to another cloud storage service. For our purposes, stick with the email method.
- If this is something you’d like to do regularly, you can choose to automatically get exports every two months for a year. For a one-time export, keep “Export once” enabled.
- Lastly, choose a file type and size. Keep “.zip” as the file type. Google will split your export into multiple files based on the size you select (2GB, 4GB, 10GB, 50GB). Larger files mean fewer downloads, but might be harder for your connection. Click "Create export” to continue.
- Google will now prepare your archive. This can take anywhere from a few hours to several days, depending on the size of your library. You'll receive an email titled “Your Google data is ready to download” with download links when your archive is ready. Click the links to download the .zip files to your computer.
- Once downloaded, you can extract the contents of the .zip files to your hard drive. You'll find folders organized by year and month, containing your photos and videos.
While Google Photos is a great way to store photos and videos, a local backup on an external hard drive is really a critical thing to have. I have more than a decade of memories on Google Photos, and it would be devastating to lose them. Take some time to ensure that it never happens to you.