Google is killing off their free unlimited photo backup tomorrow and people are wondering if they should switch. I’ve written long articles about this, and even planned a video covering the alternatives, but I think the answers are pretty simple.

I want to keep getting free backups

They don’t exist, sorry. The closest you may get is Amazon Prime, which is a worse photo syncing service, and does not include videos, but it is unlimited and included with Prime if you already pay for it. Likewise, Apple or Microsoft may already be giving you tons of storage that you can use instead.

So free? Nope, but Apple’s solution is quite good as well if you’re all in on Apple devices, and Microsft’s OneDrive is decent, but not as good, in my opinion.

I can pay, but would like to pay less

OneDrive is really the only cheaper option that’s still decent. It’s $7/month for 1TB of storage, which is pretty good, and that also comes with Office, which is a nice bonus if you need them.

Other than that and Amazon (which is not good enough for me to recommend unless you really don’t want to pay, and I assume most people have Prime already), Google’s pricing is totally competitive.

I think Google is creepy

I’m not sure why you were using them until now then, but okay. In that case, I can’t really say for you, and you should go with whatever company you find the least creepy. I’d lean towards Apple here, but you do you.

My Suggestion

I actually did the research for this a couple months back and used Google’s Takeout feature to get all my photos from Google Photos, and it was over 400GB of files that took me close to a week to download. That was also close to half of my monthly data cap to download (and then the other half to upload to a new service). It was a pain, my albums did not transfer, and the services I tried instead were simply worse day-to-day experiences (sans Apple, which I contend is excellent as well).

So yeah, you may be able to save a few bucks or find a company a little less creepy, but I really think most people would be most happy staying with Google.