I found a few threads on this, but most of them were several years old, and the changes in technology over that time made it seem silly to dig up an old thread to discuss this. (Most hilariously was the person who planned to back up his photos to Blu-Ray discs. Wonder how that's going now.)
I have been re-thinking my photo backup strategy lately. Up to now I have been using external hard drives to back up photos, along with an identical backup copy of everything on a second hard drive, and then finally a third copy kept on Amazon photos.
I think I am going to stop using Amazon, or any cloud storage, for a few reasons. First, I don't really trust Amazon with all of my photos any more, especially when they are actively involved in developing facial recognition technology. Yes I know that theoretically the user agreement states that they won't use my photos for any part of this, but I don't entirely trust that. Second, I've started to do more videos, which Amazon does not offer unlimited storage for, so picking out all of my videos from my photo archive before I upload them is a pain. Third, they still stubbornly will not recognize .CR3 files as photos, even more than a year after Canon started using the format, so I doubt they ever will. And lastly, I've realized that as my collection of photos reaches into several terrabytes, sure it's great in theory to have them on the cloud, but ultimately how would I ever download all of them if anything ever happened to my local copies?
What I think I've settled on for the forseeable future is triple copies of everything saved to enterprise grade hard drives. The external USB hard drives have been ok, and I may still keep some for quick backups when I'm traveling. But with a 4TB external HDD costing about $100, and a 12TB enterprise grade internal drive only costing about $300, it makes sense to get the better quality drive to reduce the risk of failure.
So far I've purchased one enterprise drive to act as my third copy in place of the cloud, and I'm running it in an enclosure so I can use it just like the external hard drives. The only drawback is that the drive itself needs to be plugged in to the wall separate from my laptop. Running an internal drive inside an enclosure also gives me flexibility to pop the drive into a new enclosure if I ever get a computer that runs USB C. All I really need to worry about is the SATA drive connection going obsolete, but it seems like it will be around for another several years.
Long term it would be nice to use SSDs, but even as they get cheaper, HDDs keep getting bigger and bigger, so it's still much more cost effective to use HDDs, even pricey enterprise drives. I'm also going to keep at least one of the three copies in a physically separate location from the others. I had thought about running some kind of RAID setup, but I'm not sure how easy it would be to build a setup like that that still allows me to remove some of the drives and keep them off site most of the time.
How is everyone else keeping backups these days?
I have been re-thinking my photo backup strategy lately. Up to now I have been using external hard drives to back up photos, along with an identical backup copy of everything on a second hard drive, and then finally a third copy kept on Amazon photos.
I think I am going to stop using Amazon, or any cloud storage, for a few reasons. First, I don't really trust Amazon with all of my photos any more, especially when they are actively involved in developing facial recognition technology. Yes I know that theoretically the user agreement states that they won't use my photos for any part of this, but I don't entirely trust that. Second, I've started to do more videos, which Amazon does not offer unlimited storage for, so picking out all of my videos from my photo archive before I upload them is a pain. Third, they still stubbornly will not recognize .CR3 files as photos, even more than a year after Canon started using the format, so I doubt they ever will. And lastly, I've realized that as my collection of photos reaches into several terrabytes, sure it's great in theory to have them on the cloud, but ultimately how would I ever download all of them if anything ever happened to my local copies?
What I think I've settled on for the forseeable future is triple copies of everything saved to enterprise grade hard drives. The external USB hard drives have been ok, and I may still keep some for quick backups when I'm traveling. But with a 4TB external HDD costing about $100, and a 12TB enterprise grade internal drive only costing about $300, it makes sense to get the better quality drive to reduce the risk of failure.
So far I've purchased one enterprise drive to act as my third copy in place of the cloud, and I'm running it in an enclosure so I can use it just like the external hard drives. The only drawback is that the drive itself needs to be plugged in to the wall separate from my laptop. Running an internal drive inside an enclosure also gives me flexibility to pop the drive into a new enclosure if I ever get a computer that runs USB C. All I really need to worry about is the SATA drive connection going obsolete, but it seems like it will be around for another several years.
Long term it would be nice to use SSDs, but even as they get cheaper, HDDs keep getting bigger and bigger, so it's still much more cost effective to use HDDs, even pricey enterprise drives. I'm also going to keep at least one of the three copies in a physically separate location from the others. I had thought about running some kind of RAID setup, but I'm not sure how easy it would be to build a setup like that that still allows me to remove some of the drives and keep them off site most of the time.
How is everyone else keeping backups these days?
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