You Can Now Remove Your Pictures From a Google Photos Backup Without Deleting Them Entirely

Backups are always a smart move. If your data is only stored in one location, it's not safe, as it only takes one device failure to lose all that information for good. While there are plenty of ways to back up your data, companies like Google make it easy with built-in cloud backups. Once you set it up, all of the photos and videos you take are synced to the cloud, so you never need to worry about losing everything if your phone goes belly-up.

While cloud backups are convenient, they're far from the only option you have, as you could routinely save copies of your photos and videos to an external drive. If you move platforms—say, from Android to iPhone—and you'd prefer to use Apple's services over Google's, it doesn't make much sense to keep all that data on Google's servers, either. Speaking of which: Perhaps you simply don't want to trust Google with all of the media you've taken over the years, and would like to take back the data you've already shared.

The trouble is, it's been difficult to decouple photos and videos from a Google Photos backup without also deleting those items from the device you're using as well—defeating the purpose entirely. The "best" workaround has been to use a separate device or browser than the one you're using, which is more of a pain than it should be.

That's what Google's "Undo device backup" feature is all about. The company first announced it back in December, as a way for users to remove any photos and videos from the cloud, if those photos and videos are already on the device in question. The feature has been available on iOS first (perhaps as a solution for iPhone users who inadvertently uploaded their media to Google Photos), but Google is now rolling out the feature to Android users too. Now, no matter which platform you use Google Photos on, you can undo your backup while keeping all your photos and videos safe.

How to undo your Google Photos backup

If you want to delete your photos and videos from a Google Photos backup without deleting those photos and videos locally from your device, here's how: First, open Google Photos on your iPhone or Android. Next, tap your profile picture or initial, then head to Photos settings > Backup.

Scroll down, then choose Undo backup for this device. Here, tap the box next to “I understand my photos and videos from this device will be deleted from Google Photos,” then tap Delete Google Photos backup.

Google says that once you make this decision, Backup will automatically turn off for the device you're using. As such, make sure you have a plan for how to back up those items going forward. Let's say you have a Pixel phone, and you choose to undo your backup: Now, those photos and videos only exist on this Pixel. If you break your phone, or it simply spontaneously dies (which does happen), you'll lose those memories forever.

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