External Hard Drives

mousehockey37

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
So as my pictures are amassing on my laptop, the room to keep them there is dwindling. I'm looking for some help in the world of external hard drives.

Anyone have any experience and/or advice?

Also, English preferred to tech talk, lol... it'll just make things easier for all of us later, lol. TIA!
 

sheriffwoody

Well-Known Member
Have you thought about using cloud storage? If these are photos that you probably won't be accessing often, but just want to have as backup/history, Amazon's cloud storage is free with Prime. If you want to be able to access the files, an external is good to have. I like Seagate personally, but I would just read reviews before you buy.

Also consider whether you want a small, portable model or a bigger one that you leave on your desk.
 

NowInc

Well-Known Member
External hard drives are a must, but you have to keep in mind that they fail.....a lot. Its always sound advice to get two backup drives just in case one fails. That being said, here are a few of my personal recommendations:

Western Digital - 2TB. I apologize in advance but this is about to get a little technical: Western Digital makes many different types of hard drives, usually designated by color (red, blue, green etc) . The color indicates the intended use for each drive and thus if used within those designated parameters will last longer. TYPICALLY most external hard drives come with a GREEN drive in them, which for the average user (ie: not backing up thousands of photos) is just fine. However, for OUR purposes, a RED drive is FAR more reliable (They are designed to be used in network storage that writes/reads mass amounts of data at a time).

Still with me? I hope so..

So how do you GET a red drive in an external? Well..good news! Lately it seems they have been putting Red Drives into their MyBook series by default (the large drives, not the small portable ones). You aren't 100% for sure going to get a Red, but the last 4 I have obtained, only one came Green. How do you know which one you got?

2 ways: Open it up and look or find an application that can tell you (I will link to one later if I can remember to find it...it has been a while).

*whew*

NOW...if money isn't as important, I would HIGHLY recommend getting a Drobo (or other NAS solution). This way you can put your OWN drives into them, and they are amazingly reliable (just not overly portable).
 

NowInc

Well-Known Member
I have several made by Toshiba. One for music, one for pics, etc. Never had a failure, and they're a great solution.

The newer ones have been apparently having a few issues..but still are good. Just avoid Seagate as they have gone really downhill the last few years (many getting dead drives on the first day)
 

Gig 'Em Mickey

Well-Known Member
I use Western Digital. I keep one my safe at home, and 1 at my parents' house in a different city. I switch them out when we go visit. I always cloud backup using Mozy and amazon prime. Yeah I'm a bit about data.
 

Clamman73

Well-Known Member
My daily external on my iMac is a Crucial MX100 512gb ssd in a usb 3.0 external enclosure (a total of $215 from Amazon currently). That's so I don't have to hear a spinning regular drive all the time, (and fast) but do back everything up to a WD external from Time Machine and copy important stuff to another external WD drive that I leave at work. Plus all trip pictures are kept on the SD cards in a fire "proof" box, plus uploaded to Google photos.
 

mousehockey37

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Thanks everyone! This is very helpful and useful info!

I've left all my pictures on my SD cards. I couldn't imagine clearing a card, then losing the pictures and then everything really is gone.
 

NowInc

Well-Known Member
Thanks everyone! This is very helpful and useful info!

I've left all my pictures on my SD cards. I couldn't imagine clearing a card, then losing the pictures and then everything really is gone.

SD cards have a shelf life, like all other forms of storage. Usually about 2-3 years. Even if you aren't actively reading/writing to them.

I think I should have asked what megapixel your camera is? Google is offering free raw image cloud storage for free as long as the images don't exceed 16 megapixels.
 

mousehockey37

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
SD cards have a shelf life, like all other forms of storage. Usually about 2-3 years. Even if you aren't actively reading/writing to them.

I think I should have asked what megapixel your camera is? Google is offering free raw image cloud storage for free as long as the images don't exceed 16 megapixels.

12.2, it's a Canon T3.
 

WhollyHeretic

New Member
I work in IT and if backup isn't automatic things are going to get lost. Trying to sync up multiple manual backups really isn't a good way to go. I used to keep a copy of photos on my computer, my wife's, and an external drive. I had a hard drive failure and when I went to recover them from my external drive I found out it had failed as well. I copied them over from my wife's computer. I later discovered not everything had been on my wife's laptop. The originals from our honeymoon in Paris were gone. I have some low res copies of them but not the originals. I have used Google Drive for a couple of years now. It's $2 a month for 100GB. All my photos go right into my Google Drive which is then automatically synced to the cloud and my wife's computer.

Amazon now offers unlimited photo storage for prime members. Unfortunately it's not automatic, you have to upload them. Since I was running out of space in my Google Drive I uploaded all my previous years photos to Amazon and I put my current year photos in Google Drive which is automatically backed up.

Microsoft OneDrive would also be a nice solution. They have plans for $2 a month for 100GB, $4 a month for 200GB, and $7 a month for 1TB which also includes Office 365. The nice thing about Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive is you can have the files locally on your PC but also access them on your phone or from any other computer.
 

NowInc

Well-Known Member
I work in IT and if backup isn't automatic things are going to get lost. Trying to sync up multiple manual backups really isn't a good way to go. I used to keep a copy of photos on my computer, my wife's, and an external drive. I had a hard drive failure and when I went to recover them from my external drive I found out it had failed as well. I copied them over from my wife's computer. I later discovered not everything had been on my wife's laptop. The originals from our honeymoon in Paris were gone. I have some low res copies of them but not the originals. I have used Google Drive for a couple of years now. It's $2 a month for 100GB. All my photos go right into my Google Drive which is then automatically synced to the cloud and my wife's computer.

Amazon now offers unlimited photo storage for prime members. Unfortunately it's not automatic, you have to upload them. Since I was running out of space in my Google Drive I uploaded all my previous years photos to Amazon and I put my current year photos in Google Drive which is automatically backed up.

Microsoft OneDrive would also be a nice solution. They have plans for $2 a month for 100GB, $4 a month for 200GB, and $7 a month for 1TB which also includes Office 365. The nice thing about Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive is you can have the files locally on your PC but also access them on your phone or from any other computer.

+1 for OneDrive. Its been one of my "best kept secrets" for about a year now. It integrates very well with windows 8/8.1 and will pretty much be a much bigger part with windows 10. Its a fantastic value (considering you get office 365 with it) and its actually really fast.

Good news for us, as consumers, is cloud storage is a very competitive market now. For a while DropBox was king with a few others trying to edge in..now you have bigger names like Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc getting in on it and all are trying to out do one another. In the end..it benefits us. The only "crutch" to it all is the Data Caps on your "Unlimited" internet that some providers sneak in (I'm looking at you, Comcast!).
 

gsrjedi

Well-Known Member
I use CrashPlan. For free it's an automatic backup to external hard drives or another computer on your network. You can also back up to a friend or family's computer for free over the internet. For $6/month you get unlimited online storage. Where Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. are designed to sync the files between multiple computers, CrashPlan is mainly storing a copy for you. You can access your files on the web or with apps if you need one. They'll also mail you a hard-drive (for a fee) if you're computer fails and you don't want to redownload a large chunk of data.

I've got about 1.25 TB stored with them and when my PC died last year it certainly helped keep the stress away. I still need to get a large external drive and get a local backup going.
 

NowInc

Well-Known Member
I use CrashPlan. For free it's an automatic backup to external hard drives or another computer on your network. You can also back up to a friend or family's computer for free over the internet. For $6/month you get unlimited online storage. Where Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. are designed to sync the files between multiple computers, CrashPlan is mainly storing a copy for you. You can access your files on the web or with apps if you need one. They'll also mail you a hard-drive (for a fee) if you're computer fails and you don't want to redownload a large chunk of data.

I've got about 1.25 TB stored with them and when my PC died last year it certainly helped keep the stress away. I still need to get a large external drive and get a local backup going.

Crashplan is great. OneDrive is actually a happy medium between that and dropbox (You can store file online without them synced on your system, or sync if you choose).

The one thing we need to keep reminding people is to make sure your "unlimited" internet isn't data capped. More than a few providers will literally cut you off if you go past a certain "reasonable amount" of bandwidth in a month (even tho they claim they are unlimited). Cloud backups and restoring use a LOT of your data, and Its a real hassle do have to call your provider to get your access restored.
 

thomas998

Well-Known Member
All digital media as a finite life span. I've had hard drives fail over the years, and the worst experience was after realizing one had failed I had the backup fail before I was able to make another copy of everything. At that point I stopped relying on hard drives as the only backup. Now I still back up everything on to a hard drive like before, but I also never delete the files from the memory chip and keep the chips in a fireproof box as my second backup of everything.

And while some will point to cloud storage as a good idea, it has had issue in the past. I recall many people lost a lot of photos years back when a cloud storage service went bankrupt. They did provide warning that their service would be gone in 30 days, but all that did was insure that everyone tried to get their photos at the same time to the point that lots of people were never able to get their data from the cloud before it was turned off.
 

NowInc

Well-Known Member
And while some will point to cloud storage as a good idea, it has had issue in the past. I recall many people lost a lot of photos years back when a cloud storage service went bankrupt. They did provide warning that their service would be gone in 30 days, but all that did was insure that everyone tried to get their photos at the same time to the point that lots of people were never able to get their data from the cloud before it was turned off.

Thats why I always suggest people stick with bigger names in cloud storage. Google, Amazon, Dropbox, Microsoft...chances are high that they are here for a bit. Especially since google, apple, and microsoft are all heavily trying to integrate their entire infrastructure to utilize cloud storage and computing.
 

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