Best practices for management of missionary pics/emails during mission

[BrianEdwards]

The recent kerfuffle with the missionary Google Drive access, got me to wondering if there's any official best-practices for missionaries regarding handling their pictures and other Google docs while serving their missions? I know there's some unofficial pointers in the Forum like the following:
what we recommend missionary families do...
linking a missionary google account...

I know this may have been discussed in other threads, but I don't remember seeing anything that states whether all missionaries are receiving guidance like this. If most missionaries were actively downloading (or somehow syncing) their pics and such during their missions, there likely wouldn't be as big of a concern if there's access outages at some point, since most/all of their stuff would already be available "back home". Perhaps the Church doesn't want to push this onto the missionaries, to help them focus less on those aspects and more on their callings. But then a few seem to get home and not transfer everything in the required timeframe, and then lose important mission memories. We don't have any missionaries currently serving from our unit, so I'm unaware of what type of instructions they may or may not receive about this.

[Cmanrogers]

I am a current missionary, so perhaps I can shed some light on the matter. There are articles available on ServiceNow that instruct missionaries how to back up their data, but it usually only talks about Google Photos and MicroSD cards (Along with Google Takeout and POP for when you return home.) And I'm not sure how many other missionaries actually read those. The unofficial methods are good, though I don't have storage issues so I don't use them.

What I personally do is make the settings save all my photos and files to my MicroSD card instead of internal storage, so all I have to do when I get home is take it out, put it in my computer, and copy it to Dropbox. I also back up to Google Photos, and I have a USB-C flash drive that I could also back up to if needed.

[sbradshaw]

One of the big things that gets misunderstood is that "sharing" access to a photo or a folder of photos doesn't back up the photos to the other account. The original account is still the "owner" of the photos, so if the original account is deleted, amen to the photos thereof. The photos need to be copied out of Google Drive to somewhere else, otherwise they remain a part of the account that will eventually be deleted.

[RyanZim]

I'm putting in a shameless plug for this: https://universe.byu.edu/life/save-your ... d-forever

For emails, you can use POP3 at the end of your mission but in many cases the missionary mail site doesn't give you the right password to enable it until you're released. You can download just your missionary gmails anytime during a mission here https://takeout.google.com/settings/tak ... stom/gmail

For pictures, the options are:
A) use a microSD card. If you want extra data resilience, you can clone the card at intervals during a mission and mail the clone home.
B) use Google Photos, set quality to Storage Saver, and enable Partner Sharing to a personal gmail account with a storage subscription and enable autosave. Any pictures/videos deleted from the missionary Photos would remain on the partner's account.

reach out here for help: https://missionary.pro/

[BrianEdwards]

@Mods -- I suggest considering putting the previous post as a separate pinned thread somewhere. I read the article, and skimmed (very briefly) through the accompanying "Save Your Mission Memories Before They Expire: A Guide" doc. That's the most complete and concise explanation I've seen, of one of the most-often asked questions here in the Forum. Perhaps there's other details listed inside the myriad of threads we have about this topic, which aren't listed in that Guide, but I expect he's got pretty much everything covered. And... he's offering himself up as a personal help desk for RM's with questions.

Perhaps it's not kosher to pin a thread that's pointing to somebody's personal web pages outside of the Tech Forum, you guys will know about that. But there's an awful lot of really-helpful info in that Guide, and he really seems to have good understanding of the process, having worked in the MIssionary Department after his mission.

[RyanZim]

Brian, thanks for the glowing recommendation! I'm glad you thought the guide was complete and concise.

Unfortunately, I got a pm from the admins that even though the guide answers most questions about missionary data recovery, I'm no longer supposed to post links to the website here because of the forum code of conduct. So I don't think it'll get pinned, but the Daily Universe article should still be okay to share here since it's a publication of a church-owned school