External Harddrives

[Ralph]

I have had to recently which is only a couple of days ago had to buy a 5 TB WD External Harddrive as the 4TB was filling up fast with the larger sized shots saved.
It takes a long time to move all your stuff from one to the other but if you look at the safety aspect a new one should be better than an older one.
I still have my bird shots backed up but on that one they are all as shot and no nothing done to the shots. (Which to save space I must edit out the crap ones).

I did put in about I think they give you warning in another thread about the warning of these when I think that they are going to fail.
One of the warning's is that it it so hard to get it to connect to my laptop (computer).
When this happens it comes to a point where you just can't get it connected at all and this is when you lose whatever is on it.

One I had had lets say my daily shots of family and such on it so it had important photo's that I want to keep on it. And with it playing up I knew as soon as I can get a connection I have to move all in there to a newer but still old harddrive.

Photo are my lifes story now and to lose them would be a bad, so I am a big believer in backing up all files. I have 2 copies at all times. If one just happens to stuff up. There goes all those memories forever and like I would think many of up have got family shots and our interest in photography shots that we want to keep. And if you don't have them backed up you will never see them again.

So my advice to all no matter what type of these things you use back up as soon as you can. It make for a safer life. And one thing is you can leave your computer if something happened and walk out the house with a few Harddrives and know you can start of not from the beginning ever again.

I think there is a thing called Cloud or close to this where you can pay to store your shots as well and some may like this idea and could be what will work for you. I am more of I want control over what is mine. I know they say no one can get to them. But there are clever people out there. So I will stick to this method for now.

 

[Jeff A]

Ralph, remember one thing about back-ups If your backup copy is in the same location as your originals, it's not safe. Your backups have to be elsewhere. That could be at a Pal's place, or "In the Cloud". Of course you realize that "The Cloud" is a musty old computer down in some basement. "The Cloud" just sounds more sexy than reality.

 

[Ralph]

Ralph, remember one thing about back-ups If your backup copy is in the same location as your originals, it's not safe. Your backups have to be elsewhere. That could be at a Pal's place, or "In the Cloud". Of course you realize that "The Cloud" is a musty old computer down in some basement. "The Cloud" just sounds more sexy than reality.

Yer this is what I must do as in moving the copy to my daughter's place for extra safe keeping. It was a point I should have mentioned but at the minute I am not doing it myself so to tell someone to do something you don't do yourself isn't right in my books but it is a very important part of safe keeping. The Cloud as you mentioned was a part I had no idea about, all I know is I will not use it as I have heard a story or 2 about it and its not the best but crap happens to the best of places as well.

 

[Jeff A]

Yer this is what I must do as in moving the copy to my daughter's place for extra safe keeping. It was a point I should have mentioned but at the minute I am not doing it myself so to tell someone to do something you don't do yourself isn't right in my books but it is a very important part of safe keeping. The Cloud as you mentioned was a part I had no idea about, all I know is I will not use it as I have heard a story or 2 about it and its not the best but crap happens to the best of places as well.

The risk of fire and theft are huge. One interesting bit of trivia. I have a good friend that bought the Highest rated (for fire and temperature) gun safe available. He lost his home, and everything in it in the California Wildfires of a couple of years ago. The contents of the gun safe (largely firearms and jewelry) were all toast. It modified the way I think of gun safes, as far as fire protection is concerned.

 

[Clix Pix]

You're preaching to the choir, m'boy...... I think most of us who have been into photography for any amount of time have long since quickly realized the value and importance of using external drives to backup and store valued image files. We don't have physical negatives any more, so for digital images we need to have a method of safekeeping the original (RAW) files plus the various edited ones.

I have multiple copies of my backups and archival drives. One set goes to the bank safe deposit box each month and is swapped with the set that is in there, which I bring home and update, then the following month it returns to the bank and the other set comes back home, etc,., etc.....

I use both external SSDs and external HDDs. The latter now are primarily archival drives, while the external SSDs contain the more recent and the current material.

 

[AlphaWorld]

Yes. You need at least three copies of anything you care about. I use a NAS for my archive, but immediately after downloading images from cards, I copy them off to two external drives - that’s before I even think of formatting the cards. And I am an amateur photographer.

I have seen too many plaintive wails on photographer sites where people are asking how to get their images off a failed hard drive (yes, they had just one copy of everything). Disk has failed? destroy it, and make another backup from one of your other copies.

 

[Ralph]

Yes. You need at least three copies of anything you care about. I use a NAS for my archive, but immediately after downloading images from cards, I copy them off to two external drives - that’s before I even think of formatting the cards. And I am an amateur photographer.

I have seen too many plaintive wails on photographer sites where people are asking how to get their images off a failed hard drive (yes, they had just one copy of everything). Disk has failed? destroy it, and make another backup from one of your other copies.

I have only 2 copies but I have to do what Jeff has said as in moving one copy out of my home to another place like my daughters and then do as said, swap them over time to time to update them with the new shots taken. I am only a hobbyist at this as I never set out to make money from it but as we all treasure what we have got and taken we have to have these safe guards in place. Even if these are not up to others standards they are up to our own

What you have said is how I come to the thinking of back up as I lost a heap of shot due to them being only stored in one place. I plugged in my one and only harddrive and it would not open. Lucky for me in a way as a computer shop here was able to retrieve some but not all. I think it was about 30% of shots on it. And the cost was what I would of needed to buy another back-up External Harddrive. So my lesson came the hard way.
It would be good if they could tell you in a rough way how long these things will last for but then I think it depends on the usage of it, though this is only a guess.

 

[Reciprocum]

If all your copies are in the same city you are not earthquake proof, if they are all in the same country they are not war proof. Cloud copy theoretically solves that but all my attempts to do cloud backups failed due to internet provider throttling down my uplink bandwidth after a few GBs.
Need to ask SpaceX how much they charge to keep a memory crystal in orbit or on the moon.

 

[AlphaWorld]

If all your copies are in the same city you are not earthquake proof, if they are all in the same country they are not war proof. Cloud copy theoretically solves that but all my attempts to do cloud backups failed due to internet provider throttling down my uplink bandwidth after a few GBs.
Need to ask SpaceX how much they charge to keep a memory crystal in orbit or on the moon.

You are still toast if the sun goes nova. You need toy launch your images on their way to another galaxy!

Might be a bit challenging for the recipients to convert the files into images, those, especially if their vision uses different colours from ours...