Larwbuck Loc: Seattle, Washington

WD does have some good options - I have 2 devices. A cloud device (4TB) that hooks to the router so I can share data between multiple computers and a My Book (8TB) that acts as an external only. I'm in the process of mirroring between the two however it is labor intensive to do so, for some reason the My Book just is not very compatible with the cloud devise. If I were you I'd think about a large storage device such as the WD Cloud so you can share between with multiple computers - the caveate is your internet - mine is very sluggish (Dish Based) that's why I added the My Book External. In terms of space I'd consider 8TB or larger with mirroring built in, just a suggestion.

GENorkus Loc: Washington Twp, Michigan

***Just a note:

If you use catalogs when storing files, use the same program to transfer photo files to whatever offline storage unit you will be using. From many other photographers, Lightroom seem to have "issues" when transferring files and not using the initial program to do it. I've not heard of problems transferring catalogs or sessions if you use Capture One Pro 11, but the factory still suggests going through the program just in case.

Just Shoot Me Loc: Ithaca, NY

Agreed G Tech is the way to go. Have a 2 TB and a 4 TB. They last forever (Well almost)

SteveR Loc: Michigan

Bob, It's only for Mac, though?

Just Shoot Me Loc: Ithaca, NY

G drives are pre-formatted for Mac but easily reformatted for windows.

AircraftGuru

In August 2016, I bought a HP Envy 17 with a 1 TB hard drive ..... my son (director of IT Projects and Programs at a college) told me that he believes that Intel has a 1 TB SSD (Solid State Drive) ..... I called Intel ... and was told the site for their 1 TB SSD ..... on that page, it showed the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) of 1.6 million hours .... that is 180 years running 24/7 .... Wow ..... I then searched Amazon for that part number and found it for around $300 ..... I printed that page and took it to our local Best Buy store .... and the sales rep looked up that part number and they had it in a warehouse and he was willing to do a price match ..... and their Geek Squad would swap our the HD for the SSD for $100 .... and copy my programs and data from my 6 year old HP Envy to the new Computer ...,, this worked out great ....... that drive is super fast and reliable .......
Plus, I back up to a large external HD behind the right monitor (I have 2 - 23” monitor’s .. one on each side of the laptop screen .... this is great for photography and also genealogy research. And for additional backup .... I have 2 additional external drives .... one in a Fireproof, locked filing cabinet ... and the other in our son’s gun safe 500 miles away.
Why have I done this ..... I am used to Murphy’s Law .... I am a retired Aeronautical Engineer with a Commercial Pilot’s license from over 50 years ago .... I have a bunch of flight time as a pilot and also as a Flight Test Engineer Flying with Engineering Test Pilots in prototype aircraft in my early years .... a long time ago .... and in those years I experienced 6 partial or complete engine failures .... either with me flying or with test pilots. And other things going wrong up there (like not getting a landing gear down light after lowering the gear ..... and had crash equipment waiting for me ..... turned out to be a bad sensing switch driving the gear down light).
Anyway .... all of my digital photos, scanned prints, scanned slides, Family history, etc is too important to loose. Good luck to all of you. Family photos, genealogy and history is very precious. Good luck to all of you. And a major compliment to the person(s) who got this web site going for those interested in photography. I have really enjoyed this site.

pmackd Loc: Alameda CA

I use THREE consumer quality Western Digital hard drives for my photo files, one internal and two external. Plus one Seagate external which I don't trust as much since another one of the same ilk failed within two years. As far as red, black, purple, striped whatever higher end drives I'm not aware that Western Digital (or anyone) publishes honest, reliable data on time to failure. Until I see such data I prefer to have TWO consumer quality drives over one fancy one, no matter how expensive the latter.

bpulv Loc: Buena Park, CA

I use Western Digital hard drives exclusively. Both my WD My Book USB drives and the five WD Red drives that I use in my RAID system have performed flawlessly over the years.

Computer security experts say you should always maintain a minimum of three (3) forms of backup for your photographs. At least one should be off site to protect against loss in the event of fire or natural disaster. The Cloud is not the best choice because your photos will be under the control another party. I do not and will not use cloud storage because my photos would be under the control of a second party that may have technical problems, financial failure or bankruptcy, sale to an unreliable party or may hold my data hostage to rising costs. In addition, when working with a large number of large raw files at a time as I do, the sheer size of uploads combined with the speed limitations of internet connections means your computer can be running 24-hours a day. If you are a professional, the upload may never catch up. Instead of cloud storage I uses the system that I will describe for you below.

1) All storage of photographs is external to the computer’s (iMac) internal drive except for a COPY of the raw files that are temporarily used on the internal drive during the editing process.

2) Downloads from the camera, editing, final product and primary storage is on an external 5Tb Western Digital My Book drive.

a) Each shoot is stored in a folder identified by date in the format "YYYYMMDD" followed by a space and a title. The date format allows the computer to correctly file the folders in date order.

b) Within each folder are three sub-folders labeled “RAW”, “Edit” and “Final”. All uploads are made to the RAW folder and only copies of the raw files are copied to the Edit folder for editing. The final output that may include JEPG, TIFF, etc. files are transferred to the Final folder.

3) The complete primary storage drive is backed up to a Drobo 5-drive RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). This allows multiple backup copies of the data along with offsite backup. In addition, the Drobo’s firmware automatically corrects any data transfer errors and insures that all backup drives have matched data. The RAID consists of five Western Digital Red Drives, which are designed for this type of service and have an excellent reputation for reliability. Furthermore they are “hot swappable” which means they can be safely inserted and removed from the Drobo without removing power from the system.

a) The Drobo is only powered on when backups are being made. Otherwise, it is powered off. This limits the exposure to possible hacking.

c) Although the Drobo can hold up to five drives, only four are in the unit at any given time. Three of the drives are never removed and provide the basic redundancy.

d) The fourth drive position is used for the offsite backup. Two drives are used for that purpose. Once a week or as necessary, drive 4 is removed from the Drobo and taken to the bank. Drive 5 is removed from my safe deposit box and drive 4 takes it place in the box.

4) Drive 5 is inserted into the Drobo where the data from Drives 1, 2 and 3 are automatically copied to it.

dparsh Loc: Massachusetts

I learned the hard way. I have had external drives and still do use them. But I do not depend on them. I lost almost all my photos when 1 went bad. Thankfully not all because I had another computer that I had backed up a lot of pictures also. Now I am not taking any chances (I hope) I have the camera sd card, two external drives and the computers. I was devastated when I lost my photos

jeep_daddy Loc: Prescott AZ

Get a usb3 drive and you should be ok. What i do is download my images to my computer's internal SSD drive, cull through the images, edit those that I want to edit, complete other tasks involving organizing them, and then move them to the external drive for storage. If you edit using the external drive, it will be slower, so edit while they are on the internal drive, and then move them and store them on the external.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

For consumer class drives, Backblaze publishes failure data every quarter for tens of thousands of drives - it’s about the best data available. They don’t use enterprise class drives because of cost, redundancy and expected drive failure strategy, but I would comment, after 25+ years with the major storage companies in the industry (EMC, Oracle, NetApp, IBM, DataDirect...) that enterprise data storage companies, who have to stand behind their products and their reputation for not losing customer data, use enterprise class drives for a reason.

Pkfish Loc: Wilson Wy

I have several WD 4tb drives and have needed them. I’m looking into ssd drives. Trying to figure out the best long term solution. I think they will come down in price and go up in volume very soon.

was_a_guru

Here's my backup strategy:

I replaced my laptop HD with a 2 TB Crucial SSD. (Cloned the HD to the SSD and then replaced the HD with the SSD). Less exposure to a drive failure.

I purchased 2 WD 2 TB internal HDs and put them into two Sabrent SATA to USB 3.0 enclosures.

On a weekly basis I use Macrium Reflect to alternately clone to the HDs. That way I am doubly backed up and at most should my laptop SSD fail and one of the two HDs fail simultaneously (highly unlikely) I lose at most a weeks worth of data, sort of as I don't delete that weeks worth of camera pics until I am sure they are backed up to the HD. I start this before I go to bed at night and it is done in the morning (actually way before).

One advantage of this is, should my SSD fail (system corruption) I can open up the Sabrant enclosure, remove the internal HD, and replace the laptop SSD with the cloned HD. My system is up and running again and I don't need to fresh install the OS (Win10). I can then re-clone to the SSD and repeat steps one and two above.

I also on regular basis using a Seagate 2 TB HD, image my system drive and then store it at an off-home site. So if my house burns to the ground I'm still protected.

However, you should ALWAYS verify the backup or image worked. Don't trust the SW saying the operation completed successfully. That being said I have never had a problem using Macrium.

rfmaude41 Loc: Lancaster, Texas (DFW area)

I use 6 Seagate Constellations (Enterprise level) HDD's in two sets of RAID arrays (a RAID 1 and a RAID 0+1.) They have all been running for more than 6 years, no problems, no failures.

sloscheider Loc: Minnesota

What model of iMac do you have? If you have a thunderbolt interface that will give you the best performance but USB will give you more portability. I'm sure others have pointed out you want to have at least 2 external drives, one to use as your primary and the 2nd as a backup drive.