grampy26 wrote:
Just learned that my external hard drive which held my pics is unrecoverable. Unfortunately I did not have all of them backed up some where else. Hard lesson to learn and am looking into the best and least expensive way to have multiple back ups.
You've already experienced a disaster because of short sighted thinking. Looking for the least expensive backup solution signals you are about to commit another mistake.
You will need to establish for yourself how important your images are, and what that means in terms of value/cost.
Least expensive is a relative term. I would look at the premium, no expense spared, backup solution and start to dial back from there. You will learn how to do it right, what that will cost, and as you dial back you can then make informed decisions about what your tradeoffs will be.
You will need to establish your current needs, and project what your future needs will be.
A good back up will include multiple drives and/or an NAS, with dupes in different locations, a cloud based solution such as CrashPlan, BackBlaze or Carbonite, and for disaster recovery, a means of creating an image of your system drive, in the event you lose your system drive. Something you will do each evening.
You cannot get a 4 TB drive that is reliable for $120. They are universally cheap and junk. However you can get a Western Digital Black or RE drive (standalone or RAID), or an Hitachi Ultrastar for around $210, and buy a case (single drive, USB 3) for around $40, then you'd have a decent drive that should last to the end of its 5 yr warranty. Other than the Seagate Constellation drives the rest are junk. Cheap, when it comes to data integrity, is a false economy.
If you go NAS, forget about Drobo, Seagate, and most other solutions - Synology is the choice of IT professionals and photographers alike. The are modular, fast, reliable, expandable, and many offer a personal cloud with data encryption that is actually pretty good.
As you can see, a proper backup is not a trivial matter, unless you want to be in the same situation with a bunch of low cost consumer oriented drives that are designed to fail.
Obviously, only you can judge for yourself what your price sensitivity is, and to what extent you will go to protect your images (and other data). j