I spilled vanilla latte all over my desk and cleaned it up - but my dumb ass didn’t even NOTICE that my phone was there until minutes later. It got drenched in coffee. I wiped it with a towel soaked with water, but responded to a text before fully powering it off.
It’s been off for the last few hours. I just now read that coffee is corrosive. What will happen to the pictures? Photos are really important to me, and I will die without them.
Is there anything I could do?
Anything that is extremely important to you should be backed up constantly. Redundancy is your friend. Read up on the 3-2-1 rule.
I read horror stories of stolen laptops/phones and fried hard drives and made sure it could never happen to me.
You should have a digital backup of your photos/videos in the cloud (not just syncing like iCloud, but an actual archive) and a physical backup like your computer that should also be backed up physically (like a NAS) and digitally.
The 3-2-1 rule essentially states that in order to optimally protect data, you must have three copies of the data: the original and two backup copies. These data copies should be on two different types of media (like cloud and physical) with one copy located offsite (in case of fire or theft or electrical surge that fries the data).
The more important the data, the more vigorous you need to be in protecting it.