xt2 Loc: British Columbia, Canada

Here is a good source you could easily find: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-external-hard-drives

Cheers

mikedent Loc: Florida

This is a good summary of drives...

Real Nikon Lover Loc: Simi Valley, CA

Thanks Gene. I have only had two drives ever fail on my. Both factory HP Seagates. I have half a dozen drives the oldest being about 15 years old and it still gets the job done. I know it is a matter of time. I have several cloned. My goal is to use the blue print published by Joseph Cristina to build a "Digital Fort Knox". I don't trust cloud services not because of the provider but because the internet is not guaranteed to operate and can shut down at a moments notice leaving me stranded. The plans laid out by Joseph for the Digital Fort Knox is an affordable unraid back-up solution. I just need the time to do build it. Right now time is a precious commodity. So I am going with the 3x 8TB system.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

First, your copy in the cloud is a disaster recovery copy - NOT a substitute for a local backup, and if the internet becomes unavailable for extended periods of time, we’ll have lots bigger problems than losing our photos. Your medical records, financial information and accounts, social security, and even the data of our armed services, civilian agencies and intelligence services as well as about 70% of American businesses reside in the cloud. Why? Because IT professionals across the entire spectrum realize that they cannot implement the availability and reliability of the cloud for the same price, and you, as an individual, certainly cannot. The source of your ideas is a photographer, NOT an IT professional specializing in data storage.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

I would never ever use the cloud for live (working) storage just for that reason. If the ISP goes down for a bit, you can't get to your files!
I use the cloud for backup only, which I've not had to use since I started a cloud service YEARS ago. If my ISP is down for a couple of hours, my backup proceeds when it comes back, and I can use local files anytime I want, in the mean time.
My local backup is to a couple of externals.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Without paying a monthly fee, the capacity is 5GB, which is good, but maybe not good enough.

cahale Loc: San Angelo, TX

To me, the issues are space and speed. The new solid state "drives" take up very little space, are portable to any host using USB ports, work extremely rapidly, and don't require another space in an already full power strip to function. Solid state gets my vote.

coolhanduke Loc: Redondo Beach, CA

I second the SSD approach to backup. Much faster, reliable and compact than all of the hard drives I have.

11bravo

They all have a place. I use both: external desktop drives for home, and usb powered HDD's for travel.

I'd suggest a Rosewill RX-358 external case (though these may no longer be available):

https://www.newegg.com/rosewill-rx-358-u3c-blk/p/N82E16817182247?Item=N82E16817182247

It has an internal fan that keeps the drive COOL. For inside, get an ENTERPRISE grade HDD, as in

HGST Ultrastar DC HC320 HUS728T8TALE6L4 8TB 7.2K RPM SATA 6Gb/s 512e 3.5" Hard Drives

Given I have a LOT of RAW photos, 2 of the Ultrastars serve me well in rx-358 enclosures.

Heat is the enemy, and a lot of external cases are plastic with poor ventilation (I used to have a 6" clip on desk fan positioned over a Buffalo case to prevent the drive from overheating). Best to monitor drive temps (I use HardDisk Sentinel, paid). Even SSD's can heat up with prolonged writes...

For my travel HDD's (2), I use some no-longer-available HGST Touro 3 TB drives, plus an internal HDD in the 2nd drive bay (3 copies total). While SSD's have come down in price, I travel for months at a time and take a lot of photos, so SSD's haven't quite reached a price where they are affordable for my needs (my travel notebook is a refurbished Lenovo T430).

For an external SSD case, I use a cheap Wavlink (Newegg) USB3 enclosure.

https://www.newegg.com/wavlink-wl-st235-enclosure/p/0VN-0069-00007?Item=9SIA6PF55P8627

I like it because I can leave the top off to increase ventilation.

I use Hard Disk Sentinel (paid program, packages are available as I have on every computer) to monitor drive temps.
https://www.hdsentinel.com

gouldopfl

I have been in the computer game since I started programming from punch cards. All hardware will fail. Every single one. Today the only way to guarantee to be able to recover files foe the longest time is to use cloud storage with a very reputable company. I pay about about 50.00 a year for enough storage to save every computer program I ever wrote plus the OS and development environment plus every photo that I have taken that I wanted to keep. My laptop automatically backs up to my QNAP NAS. There is a program there that runs nightly to backup to the cloud. Some people I know say that I am paranoid but I have had to go back to offline storage a few times in the past to recover projects. One project was over 10 years old and they lost their backup. I charged them 10k to recover which took me about 30 minutes but they happily paid that amount

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

👍👍 Completely agree!

coolhanduke Loc: Redondo Beach, CA

Punch cards, wow.
Did you ever work with perforated tape machines? Operated one at a type setting company. Shortly after Gutenberg hot metal presses.
But to your point, yes all hardware will fail so have fault tolerant components or backups of everything.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Ahhh, yup.
I was weened on FORTRAN using punch cards.
Later used an IC test system that the test program was stored and read from paper tape. A Datatron 4400 test system. The Operating System was stored on paper tape also. We had to put the bootstrap loader in manually via a maintenance panel using Octal.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

If I may join the conversation, not only did I become acquainted with punch cards when I was an SE (we called them CEs then) for IBM in 1964 on the new 360 system, we used them in Viet Nam in 68/69 and changes in humidity played hell with keypunches, collators and sorters. Worse, we used S folded paper tape for diagnostics on the FADAC artillery fire control system - you can imagine how that worked out in monsoon season.