Indi Loc: L. I., NY, Palm Beach Cty when it's cold.

I have about 5 external hard drives attached to my desktop plus I have a 1TB External SSD for my laptop and desktop. I also have Microsoft OneDrive for cloud. The
The External SSDs I use to clone (using Acronis) each main drive. I also have a few flash drives I use for financial files.

On the external HDs, I store all my photos which are backed up to each of them. Main HD externals are 2.5, 3, and 5 TBs. BTW, I only use Western Digital HDs. All my documents & financials are backed up on everything, especially, OneDrive cloud.

When I go to FL, I take the dedicated cloned SSD, some of the flash drives, and another 1 TB SSD for working data.
Complicated, but it does the job.

BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

I would stay far, far away from Drobo. I went through two. Both failed within 2 months of the end of warranty coverage and Drobo absolutely refused and and all assistance until I paid for their support plan. Which IMHO is far too costly. Look at the offerings of Other World Computing. I run one of their Thunderbay 8 devices (42 TB) using SoftRAID set as RAID 5 via fiber optic cable.

PACSMAN Loc: MA

Another thumbs up for Synology - I've had mine for several years and it just works. It will do a weekly backup to a USB drive that you can also store offsite.

DWU2 Loc: Phoenix Arizona area

You might want to read this about Drobo: https://scottkelby.com/?s=drobo

Carl1024 Loc: Kaneohe, HI 96744

I own a Lenovo tower thats slow @ times so whenever i close nightly, i shut all programs.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

And that is the problem with trusting your data to small, non- enterprise storage companies. If it’s a RAID, even though they may call it by a standard RAID level (0,1,5…), the actual way the data is laid down on disk is not necessarily readable by another RAID controller except maybe for RAID 1 (simple mirroring). And a NAS is worse. Why? Because with a NAS, it owns the file system, which to save licensing costs, is usually a proprietary, small company created product. Now since the file system is just behind the OS in terms of importance, do you really want to trust your data to a company that just has a few SW engineers? They may be brilliant SW designers, but they don’t have the resources (or $) to do the kind of testing and QA of a Microsoft. Personally, if I couldn’t afford enterprise class storage from NetApp, EMC/Dell, etc., I’d buy a JBOD (just a bunch of drives) enclosure from a reputable company, and let Windows/NTFS or MacOS create the RAID groups or act as a NAS server (both have that capacity built into the OS). You can bet the file system will be well tested and stable and that the data on disk can be read by any Windows or Mac computer. And whatever you do, keep a DR (disaster recovery) copy of your data off-site, and test your local backup system (backup is easy, recovery is where the potential pain resides).

Just my opinion(s) as usual.

Riverrune

What everhappened to 5 and a half inch floppy disks????
I use two 1TB external hard drives for my photos, one as the main photo drive and one as the back up. I do regularly back up the drive on my computer as well to a third external hard drive (Mac Time Machine) so my Lightroom index files are saved. I'll start using the cloud through Adobe as well.

OldSchool-WI Loc: Brandon, Wisconsin 53919

Is your backup in a photo business or personal setting? Stills or video? You have already gotten plenty of advice opinions. And different pricings. I, for one---don't yet trust clouds. Either they might fail---go out of business or you might even forget where they are---unless you are using that system daily for business. I have a dozen 1/2 Tbyte USB drives for all my storage and my laptops have four USB ports. I have not yet had a drive failure, either on my computers or peripherals. I used to use drives in enclosures but now use the self contained HD units. But keeping them smaller and older---they are cheaper. And if one should happen to go? You are not stuck with trying to recover Tbytes. But I am from the time where one partitioned everything.-----Preferences----ew

rbest77701

Like others here, I have two USB drives, plus I use Backblaze for cloud backup. I use a 4TB SSD USB as my main drive, then an 8TB drive USB Drive as backup and I back that one up to the cloud using Backblaze.

Manglesphoto Loc: 70 miles south of St.Louis

Nope they are treated as separate drives my back ups are not automatic, I transfer the data to each drive after I finish working on the file or images.

Picture Taker Loc: Michigan Thumb

Drives do fail. I do my 1st back up off the camera card before I do anything else. and it's goes on 2 separate drives (Filled my 5T and now use 8T drives). I will then load the card to a working drive (this tends to keep the computer from too much junk and slows the computer down) I process my pictures and then down load them to two other drives. All 4 drives are for safe keeping. Double back every thing. You lose them you can't replace them in most cases. ALL DRIVES DO FAIL sooner or later

JhnMhn

I can strongly recommend a backup off site. Have used three sets of drives for years:one set attached to computer for active use, one set at home but not attached so line protected from line surges etc., and one set stored at bank. Rotate and update the two non attached sets whenever have any significant changes/additions to the active attached set.
Was away from home when a catastrophic fire completely consumed my home and everything in it…including over 100,000 transparencies. Fortunately the most important transparencies had already been digitized and backed up, along with many thousands of raw digital files, and a set stored at the bank. Also backed up on the bank drives was a current bootable copy of my OS and all software programs with serial numbers, etc.
Bought a new computer (built a new home…epic story there!), loaded the backed up OS and programs from the bank drives, bought two sets of drives to repeat the 3 set system, placed a current set in the bank and my business was operational in days.
The set kept in a bank is in a town 30 minutes away, very unlikely to suffer a disaster affecting my home. Really don’t care for cloud storage susceptible to hacking hijackers and other risks that simply don’t exist with banks. We all pick the risks we are most comfortable with.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

They died out of obsolescence. Did not hold enough data to save a single modern jpg.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Glad your off-site DR copy saved your a$$ - there’s a lesson to be learned from your experience. But, if the cloud worries you (so easy to encrypt your data and hackers don’t care about your personal files - they’re looking for company DBs with SSNs), what should worry you is will that backup drive in the bank actually spin up? (a large percentage of drive failures occur on start-up). Which do you think is more reliable - a hundred dollar drive or 3-5 copies of your data stored at separate geographic locations, in hardened and professionally managed data centers, on redundant storage with redundant servers, networking and power?

OldSchool-WI Loc: Brandon, Wisconsin 53919

----Monumental!--ew