Losing my iPhone or having my iPhone stolen is a nightmare of mine. I hope it never happens. That’s why I try to prepare for the eventuality of having all my data gone in an instant. I back up my iPhone routinely, and I know what I would do if it vanished.
Starting Thursday, I have another way to back up some of the iPhone data I care most about and do it in a secure way. Proton announced that its cloud storage product, Proton Drive, supports automatic, end-to-end encrypted iPhone photo backups.
Proton Drive is a good alternative to Google Drive, iCloud, Microsoft OneNote, Dropbox, and any other cloud storage service. Proton’s advantage over some of its rivals is that it offers end-to-end encryption for the data you store in the cloud.
Proton Drive is available as a separate app on iPhone. That’s how you’ll start backing up your iPhones to Proton’s cloud. Proton says in a blog post that it encrypts both the photos and the metadata on the device before they’re synced to the cloud. As long as you don’t forget your password, you’ll be the only person able to access the cloud files.
To start backing up iPhone photos to Proton Drive, you’ll need to download the Proton Drive app for iOS. Then, enable automatic camera uploads, let the app access your photos, and you’re done. After that, Proton Drive will keep grabbing all your pictures and organize them by date and month. You can manage the photos in Proton Drive and delete the ones you don’t actually want to keep.
You’ll get a free Proton Drive account if you create a Proton account. This also gives you access to other apps from the Swiss developer. Mail, VPN, Calendar, and Proton Pass are part of Proton’s offering, in addition to Drive. Proton Pass is also one of my favorites, a password manager app I use about as much as 1Password these days.
However, the free Proton Drive account only has 5GB of cloud data, which is probably insufficient to back up your entire iPhone photo gallery. Premium plans start as low as $3.49 per month for 200GB of data, assuming you go for a two-year contract. If you choose the monthly option, you’ll have to pay $4.99 per month.
Meanwhile, 200GB of iCloud Plus cloud storage costs $2.99 per month. That might be a more natural way for iPhone users to back up photos. You’d also back up your entire iPhone. iCloud also offers end-to-end encryption for data backups.
Google Photos is another alternative for backing up iPhone photos, but it doesn’t get end-to-end encryption like Proton Drive and iCloud.
