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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External Hard Drive - No FM2R
