Two things live on most computers that have nothing to do with work and everything to do with what people actually care about: photographs and music. They’re also the two things people understand least about how they’re stored, where they actually live, and what would happen if the device they’re on stopped working tomorrow.

These are not technical problems. They’re practical ones. And they’re worth understanding before something goes wrong — because this is one area where going wrong tends to be permanent.

Photographs: the family history on one device

Phone cameras are remarkable. Easy to use, always available, and good enough to capture something worth keeping. But the photographs they take don’t live in the cloud by default — not unless someone deliberately turned that feature on. They live on the phone. On one device. In one place.

Most people know, in an abstract way, that they should back up their photos. Most people haven’t done it. When I ask a customer how many photos are on their phone, the number is usually somewhere between a few hundred and several thousand. When I ask whether those photos exist anywhere else, the answer is usually no.

A cracked screen, a dropped phone, a device that simply stops turning on — any of these ends that collection. The pictures from a child’s birthday, a vacation that won’t happen again, the last photograph taken of someone who is no longer here. Gone. Not recoverable. Not because the technology failed in some unusual way, but because everything was in one place and that one place stopped working.

File formats: JPEG, HEIC, PNG, and why it matters

Every photograph is saved as a file, and every file has a format. The format is the language the file is written in — and not every device speaks every language.

HEIC is the one that trips people up most often. You take photos on an iPhone, transfer them to a Windows computer, and they don’t open — or they open but don’t look right. The fix is usually to change your iPhone camera settings to save as JPEG instead, or to convert the files when transferring. Both options exist. Neither is obvious unless someone tells you.

Music: owning versus licensing

There’s a distinction that matters here and that most people don’t know about: the difference between owning a piece of music and licensing it.

When you buy a CD, you own that recording. The disc is yours. The audio on it is yours. If the store that sold it to you closes, you still have the music. If the company that made the disc goes out of business, nothing changes. You own the object. The music is yours.

When you pay for a streaming subscription — Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music — you are not buying music. You are paying for access to music. The moment you stop paying, the music is gone. You can’t download your library and keep it. You can’t transfer your playlist to another service. You licensed temporary access. That’s what the subscription pays for.

This isn’t a complaint about streaming services. They’re convenient, the selection is enormous, and for most people it’s a better deal than buying albums one at a time. But it’s worth knowing what you have — and what you don’t.

iTunes purchases and the question of forever

People who bought music through iTunes in the early 2000s often assume they own those tracks permanently. In most cases, they do — purchased tracks can be downloaded and kept as files. But there’s a catch: the tracks are tied to an Apple account. If that account is ever lost, closed, or locked, access to the purchased music may go with it.

If you have iTunes purchases that matter to you, log into your Apple account and confirm you can still access them. Download local copies if you want them to exist independent of any account or service. A file on your hard drive, backed up somewhere else, is yours. A file that lives inside an account is only yours as long as the account is healthy.

The music you ripped from CDs

Before streaming existed, people copied music from CDs onto their computers — a process called ripping. If you did this, those files are on your hard drive as actual audio files, usually in a format called MP3. They’re yours, independent of any account or service. They will work as long as the files exist.

If that computer has never been backed up, those files exist in exactly one place. See above.