Where to put electronic photos ?

[fastfredracing]

Bear with me, I am not super techie.
I am going to really make an effort, to cut my FB time down to a minimum moving forward . Its been weighing on me for a while, the time has come .
You guys are not getting rid of me though, sorry .
I have saved thousands of photos there. I want to copy them , and save them somewhere where they just cannot go poof someday .
What are you guys doing with your electronic media ?

[stevej37]

Mine are all on my Dell Laptop.
Plenty of room to spare and it has over 10 years worth.
(I would guess 500 or so)

[LWJ]

My wife is a hobby photographer.

We have a dedicated computer for her with a backup drive. And, because it is my wife and this is her most precious thing, I have a second backup drive in my of site office.

A cloud storage service would work also.

[Baz]

I have an external hard drive - like this one. $60. 2 TB is a huge capacity! Very compact too at 4.30 x 3.10 x 0.55 inches

Toshiba (HDTB420XK3AA) Canvio Basics 2TB Portable External Hard Drive USB 3.0, Black

[group911@aol.co]

Here is 8tb of storage for $140.
I have an older one and I found the auto backup to be a PIA so I wiped it and now use it just for photo storage. I wouldn't trust the cloud and don't want to pay ransom to get my pics out of one of teh photo storage schemes.
https://www.costco.com/seagate-backup-plus-hub-8tb-desktop-hard-drive-with-rescue-data-recovery-services.product.100458004.html

[Bob Kontak]

Originally Posted by group911@aol.co

Here is 8tb of storage for $140.

Amazon has 1TB USB sticks/flash drives for $40 but my IT kid says just get a plug in hard drive as you mention.

Talked of USB 2.0 vs 3.0 compatibility with newer vs older computers using flash drives and speed of transfer.

There is some beauty to just having a USB stick hanging out of a port on the back of the computer but the initial file transfer may take some time.

[group911@aol.co]

Once I wiped the drive of the phony backup program, it was surprisingly fast to upload all my pictures. Just drag them across to the new drive in big blocks and walk away. Probably an hour to transfer 500gb.

Originally Posted by Bob Kontak

Amazon has 1TB USB sticks/flash drives for $40 but my IT kid says just get a plug in hard drive as you mention.

Talked of USB 2.0 vs 3.0 compatibility with newer vs older computers using flash drives and speed of transfer.

There is some beauty to just having a USB stick hanging out of a port on the back of the computer but the initial file transfer may take some time.

[KFC911]

As stated above .... where ever you decide to put them (PC drive or USB stick), back them up on another one also.

[Seahawk]

Originally Posted by KC911

As stated above .... where ever you decide to put them (PC drive or USB stick), back them up on another one also.

Agreed. Storage is so cheap I basically mirror both my laptops on two separate storage devices.

[jcommin]

I separate photos by event and date and everything is on my desktop. I have an art hobby so I have a separate folders for finished art work, competitions and photo references. For family photos it is by year and event.

I back everything up on an external hard drive once a month. As others have said, storage is cheap.

Recently I have decided to put very little on FB. I do have an Instagram account but that is solely for my art work. If I do take photos from my phone: I download them to my desktop. For my art work, I try to use a camera that gets downloaded to my desktop.

[93nav]

Multiple copies in multiple locations in multiple formats, if you are serious.

[fanaudical]

My "techie" answer:

I have a Synology NAS (network attached storage device) with 6TB of redundant hard drive storage. All the photos go onto the NAS. This gets backed up about once per month onto a portable drive that gets stored in the safe.

[Baz]

Anything I post on social media is already on my storage drive.

That's where everything goes first.

[wdfifteen]

I have two hard drives thatI back up to locally. I don't trust the cloud with my really important things, like photos of MsWD, but it is a good way for us to share photos. I certainly don't want to risk losing any of the photos I've taken of MsWD in the last few years.

[rusnak]

Save them to a free Flickr.com account. IIRC, Flickr will sync with FB. And Flickr has a download app so you can back up your photos to mulitple locations off of their cloud.

[rusnak]

Originally Posted by Seahawk

Agreed. Storage is so cheap I basically mirror both my laptops on two separate storage devices.

Well there is storage, and then there is backup storage.

Apple has shown such leadership it's amazing. I think iCloud is superior now to everything else in terms of storing personal documents. If you're going to back up your laptop, use Time Machine and an external flash drive, or even a multiple disk RAID array.

Their new RISC chip based machines are amazing. I think it's time to get a new MacBook based on the new chip.

As for the OP's question, cloud based backup is superior to a USB jump drive or a flash drive for photos. The reason is that the backup drives can fail or get lost. Flash drives are great for storing stuff temporarily until you weed out what you want to keep and what you want to delete. But the new photos are so huge, that option is becoming less and less desirable due to storage limits.

While working on photos, say in RAW format, you can use a two disc array. My Leica already backs up every photo in RAW and JPEG, and stores them to a two-chip array inside the camera.

[red-beard]

I've been using NAS storage for many years. It made it a lot easier to share files in our business. The technology has improved over the years. Everything is RAID now and I have 48TB of storage on the local network. This is broken up into smaller shares and the main "Network Drive" is backed each day with a 7 day rolling store. And with the VPN, we backup the very important files from the office to a mirror unit at the house.

Buffalo Link Station has a 4TB home NAS for around $189. Really simple to use.

[Por_sha911]

Originally Posted by Baz

I have an external hard drive - like this one. $60. 2 TB is a huge capacity! Very compact too at 4.30 x 3.10 x 0.55 inches

this

[pmax]

Use Onedrive.

[GH85Carrera]

Virtually any of the online "cloud" storage spaces will do it, but you pay a fee for the storage space for the fee forever.

How much space do you need? I bet it is less than 1 TB. There are some two drive Network storage devices that will give some security. Redundancy is the key. Keep a copy on the computer, and one on the backup device. Hard drives are super cheap now.

Your biggest problem will be keeping all the devices updated and sorted.