Samsung Cloud, there’s no more time: at the end of the month all photos and videos saved by Samsung users will be deleted, here’s how to save them
Addio Samsung Cloud, we all switch to Microsoft OneDrive: as announced well in advance, the time to switch data from your Samsung phone to Microsoft’s cloud is about to expire. The last useful day, for the first group of users (who have already received the notification from Samsung) is September 30, 2021. After that date, the data will be lost.
Samsung Cloud was a free cloud storage service offered by Samsung to its users, who could use it to store photos, videos, files and contacts so that they would always have them available even when they switched phones. The Korean company, however, already last year decided to shut down the service and decided on a multi-date roadmap so that users could have the time they needed to move all their files elsewhere, without losing them. The first phase of Samsung Cloud’s decommissioning ended on March 31, 2021, and included an automated procedure to keep data from being lost. Instead, from April 1 to July 31, it was possible to save data using a “bridge” computer. From August 1 onwards, it was no longer possible to upload photos and videos to the cloud. Now Samsung is taking the next step: here’s what happens on September 30, 2021.
Samsung Cloud: what happens on September 30, 2021
After giving plenty of time to users to save their data, now Samsung will proceed to delete them from its servers: it will do so, irretrievably, on October 1, 2021 and there is then time until September 30 to save these files elsewhere and not lose them forever.
The only data that will not be deleted at the moment will be those related to contacts, calendars and notes. Everything else will disappear forever.
Samsung Cloud: how to save photos and videos
As already mentioned, Samsung Cloud has been replaced by Microsoft OneDrive, but the automatic procedure to pass all data is no longer usable. In fact, the message that users are seeing on their Samsung smartphones these hours doesn’t show any option for an automatic procedure, but only allows you to download all your photos and videos from the cloud to the smartphone’s internal memory.
The problem, though, is that especially for historical Samsung Cloud users, the overall size of the video and photo files to be downloaded might be so high that it exceeds the amount of available memory on their device. In such cases, then, things get complicated.
There are two possible options. The first one is the one in which you just need to empty your phone’s memory to make enough space for the media files to be downloaded. In the first case, you can connect your Samsung smartphone to a PC or Mac and download all the files to it, to make room for the ones you want to download. Alternatively, you can enable synchronization of photos and videos on the phone to another cloud service, such as Google One, Microsoft OneDrive (Samsung’s suggested choice) or Amazon Photos and delete the files after the synchronization ends.
In the second case, the solution is more complex: it’s the case when the user’s phone has less internal memory than it needs to download photos and videos to the phone. So, even if you empty the internal memory, you will never be able to get all the stuff you want to download to your phone.
In this case, the best choice is probably to buy a new phone with more storage space and download photos and videos to it. Alternatively, you can borrow a Samsung device with enough space from a friend, use it with your samsung account and after downloading the material save it to a PC or another cloud service. Once you are done with the procedure, then you can remove your Samsung account from your friend’s phone.