If you look through the photos on your Ultimate Backup and see names like 20250523_122422_1.jpg, 20250523_122422_2.jpg and 20250523_122422_3.jpg sitting side by side, it can look as though the backup copied the same photo three times. It did not. Those are three different photos, and the names came from your phone. And every time you back up, photos already on the drive are skipped, so nothing is copied twice.
Where the _1, _2, _3 come from
Many phones — Android phones in particular — name a photo after the moment it was taken: the date and the time, down to the second. In the example above, 20250523 is the date (23 May 2025) and 122422 is the time (12:24 and 22 seconds). When two or three photos share the same second, the phone adds _1, _2, _3 so the names stay different. That happens with:
- Burst shots — if you hold your finger down on the camera button, the phone takes several photos in a row, a fraction of a second apart.
- Edited photos — when you crop or brighten a photo, many phones keep the original and save the edited version as a new photo next to it.
- Photos taken in quick succession — two taps within the same second.
Some phones use a word instead of a number and add copy or edited to the name. Either way, the files really are different photos, and Ultimate Backup is simply keeping every one of them safe, exactly as they are on the phone.
See for yourself
In the Ultimate Backup app, tap UB Drive, then open one of the doubled photos and then the one next to it. A burst shows a small change from one to the next — a slightly different expression, or something that moved. An edit shows the change you made. If you can see any difference at all, they are two different photos and both belong on the drive. Burst photos of something that is not moving can look almost the same, but the phone still saved them as separate photos — Ultimate Backup is not making extra copies.
The app never copies a photo twice
The Ultimate Backup app on your phone keeps a record of every photo it has backed up. On every later backup, a photo that is already on the drive is skipped, so the same photo is not copied again. If you do ever find a true duplicate — the same photo saved twice — it almost always got there in one of two ways: the phone itself held two copies, or the same photo was also added to the drive from somewhere else, such as a computer or an older drive.
If you do have true duplicates, the Ultimate Backup app on a Windows or Mac computer (not the phone app) can find and remove them for you — plug the drive into the computer and see How do I remove duplicate photos?. That tool removes exact copies only; burst shots and edited versions are different photos, so it leaves them alone.
If you need any additional assistance, please contact Ultimate Backup Support.