Hi,
I saw previous discussion on cloud storage for photos. I’ve been wondering whether putting all photos on the cloud eg Google photos is sufficient or should I also be doing hard drive backups and which is the most economical and efficient ie portable drive, USB sticks, SD cards? This is for everyday photos as I have a newborn and have been taking a lot more photos than usual.
Thanks
In pre-cloud days I had a hard disk plus CD-ROMs to hold my pics.
When the HDD failed, and the CD-ROM was unreadable I ended up losing 7 months of photos.
Now I use SD cards once (and keep them in a draw when full as the last chance back-up), have an external drive I copy to, another HDD at work I copy to a few times per year, and everything on Google photos.
This setup cost about $300 all up, but I would happily pay $300 for those missing shots back.
My tips are to make a system you can easily use so that all the copying etc. gets done straight away, not so you leave it till later.
A good device for this is Western Digital My Passport wireless, a portable disk with a built in SD card reader. It can be set up to automagically copy all the new files from the card onto the disk, so I just stick the SD Card in it. When I plug the drive into my computer, Google automatically backs the photos up to the cloud.
I'm sure I could write a script to do the same thing from a normal card reader, but I liked the neat package of having it all bundled up together.