Douglas Tharp Loc: Texas

I am looking for suggestions on back up of my large collection of photos.

My main drive for my pictures is a WD passport and it getting rather large. I am currently backing up using WD Backup to a WD 4tb passport one a week.

After coming close to loosing all my pictures with 2 WD passports, sent back to WD directly to a engineer, I got two replacement drives from WD.

I am looking at the WD My Duo RAID 0 with the idea to copy all the files to that as the main backup.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I backup to two external HGST Ultrastar 4 TB drives and also to a NAS. The Ulstrastar is an enterprise drive, designed to run 24/7. One backup drive is like none at all. If that fails, you have nothing. For me, 4 TB is a good size. I use SyncBack SE.

MrMophoto Loc: Rhode Island "The biggest little"

I just had a semi disaster when my main External HD died, It was a scramble to recover a lot of my images. I now have Backblaze, it auto saves the folders and files I designate to the cloud. I paid for a year of service and it backs up once a week, which is one of the preferences. It was very reasonably priced and most reviews rated it the easiest to use. I also download my finished images to multiple flash drives and keep those in a safe deposit box.
Good luck

orrie smith Loc: Kansas

It is old school, but reliable, I copy my raw photos to DVDs. This is a secondary backup, the photos are also backed up UN external hard drives. If you can afford them, the external SSD drives are most reliable.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

FWIW:

If you lose a backup you should lose nothing since you have the originals right? A backup is a copy of something, so losing a backup is not a big deal. If you are talking about an archive, well, that’s a different story...

Anyway, I maintain an hourly backup of my iMac using Time Machine. Every file, including all my images are backed up every hour to a connected external disk so that is my initial backup if everything.

I also run a monthly backup to a different external that is only connected monthly of all my images. That disk is kept in a fireproof(?) waterproof box.

I also have all my images backed up on Amazon Prime Photos as a free cloud backup service.

My cloud backup would be a last resort in case of a disaster like a house fire.

All of my images, documents and personal data are located on an external disk, backed up to an external disk.

I have a mixture of WD, Toshiba and Hitachi & Crucial drives externally connected and used either as backup or storage.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

If redundancy is what you’re after, you want to set the WD duo as RAID 1, not 0. RAID 1 is mirroring and stores the same data on each drive so that if you lose one, you have the other. RAID 0 breaks the data apart and stripes the data across the two drives for speed. The (big) downside is that if you lose EITHER drive you lose all your data because neither drive has the complete block or file.

Btw, for the poster that archives onto DVD, let me suggest that you buy a Blu ray/MDisk drive and store onto MDisks instead. Depending on the manufacturer (and some of the best known companies make the worst), DVDs can break down over time, while MDisks should last a lifetime. Available in 25 and 100GB sizes.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

Do you have a budget?

PHRubin Loc: Nashville TN USA

I have an external drive as well as using Amazon prime backup as well as Carbonite.

therwol Loc: USA

If you mean the cards the photos were taken on, yes. The first time I mentioned this here, I was criticized for wasting money by not reusing the cards. It's my money.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

No, not talking about the SD cards...once you copy the originals to your computer, good practice is to have them automatically backed up to another drive or location. If you are using a Mac and don’t use Time Machine to maintain backups you are losing out on a good free system built into OSX. Plenty of automatic backup systems for Windows as well.

In my opinion, thinking keeping a drawer full of SD cards as a backup is not a good idea. If you have 50 cards...how do you find a particular image if needed? They also are not as resilient as other forms of backup are.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

I copy to a DVD;
backup to an external;
Usually to my laptop in addition to the desktop;
and Carbonite backs up shortly after the files are created or modified.

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

I don't consider DVDs a reliable archival medium.

For one thing, a DVD will hold about 4.5 GBytes. I have about 2 TBytes of photos. I will need 450 or more DVDs to hold my photos. To find what I want, I have to look through that many (maybe half on average). Still a lot of work to find something.

For another thing, home-burnt DVDs are subject to aging faster than commercially produced DVDs, in which the data are pressed into a metal surface on the disk. Home-burnt DVDs are produced by burning the data into an organic layer on the disk, which is subject to aging at a faster rate than the metal.

In the long run, a USB external drive is more reliable as long as you treat it well. They are small and can easily fall off a desk or table, and shock is one of the biggest killers of disk drives, particularly when they're powered up. SSD drives are probably better, but more expensive.

I use external USB drives for archives and a cloud service as a secondary system. I lay my USB drives flat on the floor so they can't fall over. Usually under something so something can't fall onto them.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Clarification: My outing gets backed up to DVD, max so far has been two DVDs for one outing.
(I don't "backup" the entire photo directory to DVD.)

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

My kids will have to worry about that if they want my images... And migrate them to a newer technology.
My DVDs will last MY lifetime.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

What is your best guesstimate of how long that will be?