Hi there OzB friends,
I was wondering if anyone can recommend me the best and most reliable harddrive for photo storage.
I'm also considering cloud, all recommendations would be greatly appreciated :)
Thanks!
Best Portable Hard Drives for Photos
Starlight8 on 17/10/2022 - 15:31
Last edited 17/10/2022 - 20:53 by 2 other users
Last edited 17/10/2022 - 20:53 by 2 other users
Comments
Thanks for this, much appreciated :)
Depending on the storage size required you may find Micro-SD cards a cheaper way of doing local backups.
My dad lost all his old photos when his portable hard drive blew up. He said it was his "backup" drive. I said to him, "backup implies you have them stored elsewhere as well".
But he didn't. His fault for always buying the cheapest electronics, and for not understanding the term "backup".
Normally his photos would be on a pc.
So that would be two backups.
Add in cloud you are safe
Sounds good until the PC HD corrupts the files and you then copy the corrupted files onto the two backups and you end up with nothing.
Always check the backups are not corrupted. Always have multiple backups and cycle through them only after verifying the data on the last backup was okay.
For photo's you would need to find an app that checks that they can be opened and are not empty (aka one color or zero in size).
Buy a NAS box, 2 bays and cheapies will do as long as it is good brand, Synology, Qnap, WD. Put there two 3.5” identical drives from WD, Toshiba or Seagate, 4-12TB size. Setup NAS as Mirror. Copy photos from computer to this. Buy a portable one same size and copy from NAS to this. Do it monthly. Now you have 3 copies. Store the portable one somewhere else.
Skip cloud, slow and expensive. And you may lose the account for number of reasons, think hackers.
Dunno how you think cloud is slow if it takes a month to backup your portable one and you potentially lose a month's worth of data. Just set it up to upload overnight, speed doesn't matter. "Hackers" taking your account is pretty unlikely with a decent password that's not used elsewhere.
Also if OP is anything like me, I wouldn't bother plugging in/unplugging the portable one each month and taking it to an offsite location. The NAS isn't really two copies either, one good short and both drives will go pretty quickly. IMO it's much easier to simply pay for cloud storage and forget about it than have a complicated backup system to save a few dollars.
taking your account is pretty unlikely
Don’t underestimate users, big mistake lol
Yea, and Never put your NAS on internet. Disable UPnP in your home router so NAS won’t be able to do it itself.Don’t underestimate users, big mistake lol
Good point. Fortunately I made my cloud backup password Drowssap1, no one will ever guess that!
The issue to me is that someone who can't manage a basic cloud account probably can't proper offline storage or network security. Ransomware is just going to go after your NAS from within the network and if everything isn't properly cleansed before using that portable storage then that's gone too. Cloud is nice because it has some anti-stupid security in there too, you can't just go in there and hit delete all without a recovery period being available.
Some NAS support raid 5, but they cost more.
2 in mirror is good enough, disks got big these days. Plus mirrored you can read it standalone, unlike raid 5.
Best Portable Hard Drives for Photos
2 + cloud
with the 2 not being stored in the same location.
Ideally you should be using both the cloud and a portable hard drive.
If the photos are especially precious to you, you should be following the 3-2-1 backup rule. All forms of computer storage will eventually fail — it's not a matter of if, just a matter of when.
There's also lots of different ways you can lose locally stored data, and it's not just hardware failure that can cause it. E.g you might misplace your hard drive, accidentally format the wrong drive or have your storage get encrypted by ransomware. The brand of the drive you buy in this case won't matter since the data will be gone regardless of the drive's warranty or reliability.