rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

I'd suggest looking at G-Technologies drives. http://www.g-technology.com

Oh, and that's RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)
--Bob

BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

Start by reading about the pros and cons of RAID storage (RAID not RAD). Educate yourself then you will at least have some understanding of what you are about.

Picture Taker Loc: Michigan Thumb

I would buy the biggest drive and use it for storage and use you old drive for a working or temporary drive.

cactuspic Loc: Dallas, TX

It is difficult to be over protective of your images. I do a bunch of focus stacking and birds and have a run rate of 50,000 images/year. My oldest images are stored on two 4TB hard drives. More current images are stored on a Drobo. My Lightroom catalog is stored on a SSD. Everything is backed up to onsite but offline drives as well as to a set of drives I keep offsite. For additional protection my essential images and the last year’s images are automatically backed up daily to a drive by Carbon Cloner, which I then copy on a regular basis and move offsite.

It sounds like overkill, right? During the past 3 years, I had a Drobo fry. Additionally I had one of the HDs with old images die and found out the onsite backup was defective. I restored all of my data without losing an image because of the redundancy.

When you consider our investment in our equipment from camera bags to software....When you consider the investment of time and self... When you consider losing the memories and income stream (for some of us)...then the price we pay for backing up is cheap. There is one sad truth in the digital world, all harddrives will eventually die.

photohelp

Congratulations on thinking about back up storage of your photos. I lost all of mine (and everything else) in a fire so I am paranoid about it. We found that we could replace most things but not the photos so our record of 20 years of travel and family photos was lost forever. I presently use two servers each with four 4TB HD’s in raid 5 configurations in a fire resistant room plus 2 4TB HD's in a fire resistant safe on the property and another one in our safe deposit box at the bank. While enterprise level HD's are clearly better, I have been using top level non-enterprise disks for more than 10 years without even one failure. Remember, our use is very light compared to commercial use. I use only HGST and avoid Seagate after their disaster with 3TB disks. Here is one comparison of extremely high use HD failures. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2017/. The lower cost of regular disks allows me to use more duplication which better protects against the various risks of hacking (i.e., ramsonware), computer failure, disk failure, fire, and theft.

Picture Taker Loc: Michigan Thumb

I use 2 separate sets (total of 4) of driver. Matched pair of as taken by date and a matched pair of final saved. Also a working drive for in process.

tomad Loc: North Carolina

Really? I'm a prime member and didn't know that. Do they offer unlimited storage of any size images at no extra cost other than the prime membership?

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

If the best you can do is a DSL connection, then I wouldn’t be using the cloud either. In fact, DSL is so slow (and so 20 years out of date), that I’m surprised it doesn’t drive you nuts just surfing the Internet. If you live in parts of the country where there is no reasonable internet service, then the cloud is not a good solution. BUT, if you’re one of the majority of the population that live where high speed Internet is a possibility, then the story is very different. Assuming you have access to Gbit internet, offered in many parts of the country, and assuming maybe an actual download speed of half that, you could download the whole 3Tb in about 14 hours. Considering that Gbit internet (125 MBytes/sec) is very similar to the rated read speed of a SATA HD, it’s not only the most robust and safest archive/DR storage you can buy, the speed is very similar to local storage IF you have high speed internet. Even at slower speeds like the 300Mb down and 60Mb up that I use and that’s readily available in many cities, it doesn’t slow my workflow at all - just backup overnight. And in the event of a local catastrophic failure, I’m betting that a day or less to restore all your data will seem like a very good deal.

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

I have my photographs in my Dropbox folder, which resides on the Drobo RAID array. Everything is doubly backed up in real time, on site and off site.

tomad Loc: North Carolina

Wow, thanks chrisg. I looked it up on my Amazon account and you are correct. I am backing up 50,000 photos right now to the Amazon cloud. This is worth my Prime membership cost alone! BTW, I saved around $500 in 2 day shipping costs last year and use Amazon video and music daily. Prime is worth extra penny and photo backup is icing on the cake!

cjc2 Loc: Hellertown PA

This is SOLID, and very good, advice. Best of luck.

cjc2 Loc: Hellertown PA

I also use Synology NAS devices and have a 2, 4 and 8 drive systems which are tasked for separate purposes. All of my drives, which range from 4TB to 10TB, are either WD Red or Seagate IronWolf. Best of luck.

hpucker99 Loc: Anchorage, Alaska

Another option is to use a RAID from Otherworld Computing. They have a Mercury Elite Pro Dual series that can be set up as a RAID 1 mirrored drives.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Also, if you’re considering a RAID array, it would be very nice if you could find a consumer grade machine capable of running RAID 3, by far the best/fastest RAID level for large sequential files like imagery. Anyone know of one?

PACSMAN Loc: MA

I don't know anyone that's using RAID 3, but this will support most common RAIDs at a reasonable price. I have this model and it runs great:
https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS918+