After Celebrity Nude Photo Leaked on 4Chan, the site where Jennifer Lawrence’s hacked photos were leaked, iPhone safety talks again come out of water and make iPhone users feel uneasy. Which is the safest way to backup photos to avoid photo leaks? And which is the best way to backup iPhone photos? Those are probably the most asked questions to iPhone users now.

Definitely, iPhone provides iCloud service which provides 5GB free space for iPhone users to store iPhone Photos in Photo Stream. It is not safe. Don’t forget that the reason why the Celebrities Photo leaked was because their iCloud account was hacked. And you should admit that to save photos on iCloud and other cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive is to save your stuff on a server which can also be understood as some other people’s computer. No matter you delete it or not, it will leave trace on other people’s hard drive. If you don’t want your private photos and personal information being hacked, it’s highly recommended not to use iCloud and other cloud services to save your data. But actually Apple auto syncs photos to iCloud by default, and unfortunately only some people know how to disable the iCloud auto sync feature. And a large number of us thought if we delete photos in Camera roll, we delete them completely. To avoid your photos to be hacked, you’d better delete the iCloud photos completely, and turn of My Photo Stream and Photo Sharing in Settings >> iCloud >> Photos.

Now that iCloud and other cloud services are out of the game, let’s check what other ways we could backup iPhone photos and data.

Searching the keyword “photo backup” in App Store, you can find more than 2 hundred of results in which most of them are Cloud or Cloud manager, and some of them are Wifi transfer helper, bluetooth transfer helper.

To use Wifi transfer helper and bluetooth transfer helper, you will need to use Wifi or Bluetooth and send the photos and other information to another device which is not safe itself. Suppose if you are using public Wifi or your own Wifi is hacked by some bad geeks who can grab all data you are sending out, you are totally put into a dangerous situation. So to backup and share photos on Wifi are out of the game either.

And then let’s check the iTunes backup. You must use the USB cable to transfer which cannot be hacked while transferring. And if you backup with your network disabled, it’s even safer and you can backup all your apps, photos, contacts, etc. in a file. But with iTunes Backup file, you may have problem previewing what’s been backup. And you may need some tools to recover the data from the backup file or recover the data from the file to your iOS device.

But to be honest, I seldom use this way to backup my photos and videos since it takes quite a long time to sync and backup. I prefer the way to directly connect iPhone to computer via USB, and copy & paste photos, as well as videos from the iPhone hard drive. And after the copying, I’ll delete the original files from iPhone hard drive to release the space. Actually this way and the iTunes backup way are to transfer data via USB cable, and backup the photos and videos on your computer hard drive.

Is it safe to backup iPhone files on your computer hard drive? Well, it depends. If your computer’s internet connection is enabled, you still have the chance to be hacked by bad computer geeks through the internet. And if you disable the internet connection, you are safe. And if you could burn the photos and videos on some DVD or CD, and keep them in some safe places, it’s even safer.

In a word, after the previous reviews, the safest way to backup iPhone photos is to transfer via USB cable, and store on internet connection disabled devices or burned on DVD or CD. And if you don’t want your nude or private selfies to be leaked, then you simply don’t take those photos.

At last, iPhone 6 is coming out next week on September 9, 2014. Hopefully iPhone 6 is still safe and this issue will not affect the iPhone 6 sales volume.