I've decided to put all of my pictures on to an external hard drive. There could be up to a thousand of them, with more to come. I was thinking of 1Tb. Are there makes/models to look for/avoid, i would prefer one that was user friendly (if there is such a thing)
Thanks in anticipation.
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I don't know about any particular hardware, I do suggest that you consider the process you will use.
How will you ensure that the photographs on your computer are all copied to the external drive? And I am assuming that you will copy them, rather than move them. A single copy of photographs is not a clever idea - something can always go wrong.
Depending on how many you take, manually moving them may be a pain and prone to errors.
All our devices automatically upload photographs to Dropbox. My computer keeps a copy of our Dropbox folder, and that folder is sync'd to an external drive - there's loads of free software around, FreeFileSync is a good one.
I don't do anything and we have several copies avoiding accidents and calamities.
There may well be better / different approaches. But since mine isn't broke....
Last edited by: No FM2R on Wed 1 Apr 15 at 12:40
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Thanks NoFM2R, as you may have gathered my computer skills are "limited" The reason for copying my pictures to an external hard drive were to protect them in the event of my computer conking out or any other calamity. I assumed an external hard drive would store them remotely and re-installed onto another computer if necessary. Is the dropbox way "remote" from my computer & would not be lost if my computer went kaput?
Thanks again.
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Dropbox is effectively a space on the internet where you are allowed to store stuff. There are others, and they are called Cloud services.
There are other alternatives. I think its Flickr, but it may be one of the others, which allows you to store about 1Tb of photographs on their website.
Returning to Dropbox, the issue is the amount of space it allows you for free. If you're willing to pay then there is no issue. Insofar as space requirements are concerned, I have 17,000 photographs currently occupying 49GB. But bear in mind that picture files are becoming much larger than they used to be, so you're average picture size may be significantly different.
Nonetheless, I have space for a copy of my photographs on Dropbox.
The other advantage of Dropbox is that our phones and cameras upload new photographs automatically. Thus if one of our devices was stolen or damaged, even when we're out and about, then we would lose nothing. But it depends on the environment where you take pictures and the equipment you use.
A 1TB disk is huge for photographs unless you are going to get into serious taking. I dislike using larger disks than I have to, simply because it means you lose so much in one go, and it takes so much to copy them.
And its all very well saying that you won't use all the space, but you will.
You equally need to understand what you are protecting yourself against. A backup on a hard disk will protect you against a failed hard disk. It will not protect you against a house fire and probably wouldn't protect you against a burglar unless you hide it (which is a pain).
So, what *I* would do, and no two people agree....
I would buy 2x 500GB disks.
I would copy all my photos onto one, and anything else irreplaceable, and then go and store it at my friend's / Mother's / Cousin's whatever's house and forget about it. And I'd probably go and get it once a year and recopy - in the event of a disaster at home I could live with the loss of less than 1 years photos.
I would install the second on my computer and leave it permanently attached. I would install software which would automatically copy between my computer and that disk whenever I added a photograph. However, I would NOT two way sync. I would not allow sync to delete from the external disk. You need to protect against accidental deletions.
I use software such as FreeFileSync. Download it, install it, try it. If you don't like it, try another.
I would investigate Dropbox and other cloud services to see if they offered me anything I wanted.
Last edited by: No FM2R on Wed 1 Apr 15 at 15:49
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Thanks for taking the trouble of sending such a helpful reply. My system is the basic Windows Vista Home Premium, are all your recommendations "do able" with my system ?
Thanks again.
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Yes, everything is "doable" with Vista Home.
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>I assumed an external hard drive would store them remotely and re-installed onto another computer if necessary.
You could plug your external hard drive into any other PC and you would have access to all the photographs you put on there.
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For ease of use, using an external usb to copy your photos to is a good idea. Its what I do and I have a Hitachi 1TB USB2 drive. It works on my windows machine, It works on my Macbook, its the simple option. I even plug it into my router via the USB port it has.
Last edited by: Zero on Wed 1 Apr 15 at 16:13
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All good suggestions from Mark - as someone who has suffered a house fire, its always a good suggestion to do as he says and store things away from the actual house and the cloud is ideal for this.
But don't just stop at photos - starting from the basic - if your house was burned to the ground would you know what company your house insurance is with? Car insurance etc?
Always a good idea to scan in your certificates etc and keep an electronic copy on the cloud somewhere in case you need to access them. Handy even if you are on holiday.
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Thanks BobbyG, more good advice.
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>> Always a good idea to scan in your certificates etc and keep an electronic copy
>> on the cloud somewhere in case you need to access them. Handy even if you
>> are on holiday.
>>
We always take either our laptop or notebook on holiday, as I need access to various systems plus emails for the management of our holiday apartment. I have scanned things like passports, driving licences etc. and put copies on both machines, just in case we lose a vital document.
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... me too, and also in the Cloud, and also stuff like holiday itineraries and booking confirmations - especially as you can access from your phone (assuming you have some kind of data plan or WiFi)
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I agree that having your data (including photos) stored away from home is a good idea. I started using Amazon Glacier last year because the costs are low. It's not instant access to files (it's ultimately offline storage at Amazon) and if you tried to restore everything quickly there'd be costs. But I pay very little each month for a lot of storage.
Costs for other cloud based storage is now lower than when I started using Glacier. Quite easy to get 1TB for not a lot.
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External Hard Drive - No FM2R
