Back up solution for photos & videos

[Big Bang]

Hi all,

Over the years I've saved my photos & videos from my camera and phone onto my now 16 year old Samsung Spinpoint P 250GB hard disk drive. While it has served me well, I know that it will eventually stop working and I should have a back up solution anyway! I know I should have done this years ago, but better late than never I suppose!

I was hoping some of the forum members could point me into the direction of a backup solution. My thinking is to purchase a WD external hard drive and copy my photos and videos onto it. While on the subject, I know the best thing to backup your data is to use the 3, 2, 1 solution. I'm a bit unsure which (if any) of the Cloud storage solutions are worth getting, or if another solution is available.

Many thanks for everyone's advice in advance.

 

[koolpc]

I got backups of my backups on a few hard drives...

 

[Penfold101]

I just one onedrive - costs a few quid a month for 1TB of storage. You can also just get a 500GB M2 drive, buy a cheap enclosure and save it all to that.

 

[Donnie Fisher]

Long discussed topic previously - my case is different from your slightly, but shows some of my thinking.

I generally have the most recent stuff on the main machine, and then once I’ve sorted it, edited it etc, I’ll save It to the back up so to speak.

For many years I’ve had my photos stored across a mirrored pair of drives in a network storage device but I feel I’m on borrowed time with that method, and I’m looking at others at the moment. At the moment, I have around 1.5GB of stuff I wouldn’t want to lose. i.e. photos and family video. I dont care about music or films … they can be found anytime on line through streaming etc.

In terms of online backup - I understand the simplicity and pricing is OK but for me I fundamentally just dont trust it long term. I just dont trust another company to be around in the long long term to rely upon as the single safe place for storing stuff. (Then the paranoid bit in me thinks that the stuff you upload is being fed into all the AI … and is there a bit of the small print where they then try and have a hold on your photo data ?? Realistically chances of things like that are low … but none the less … the spidey-sense in me just doesn’t trust it.)

I could buy additional hard drives and keep them in different places - quick and easy. The niggle for me is transporting the drives and not knocking them about and the long term aspect of ensuring the data is fresh on there and not rotting away because its not being read. Also, if a drive dies … i lose ALL the data on the drive in one go.

So as old school as it sounds, I’m settling on the Blu-ray Disc as the medium to long term store the photo data … and to burn multiple copies of the discs. At 1.5GB … that’s manageable to me. Basically burn 2 copies of a disc for each year of photos/videos and file them away in a decent storage wallet in different places. Then if a disc dies or becomes unreadable, then it’s only that year that’s gone … not the whole lot if it were all on a single HDD. OK, the number of discs will add up, but in theory once I’ve burned the data I have, I’ll only have to burn a few discs per year after that.

Then attached to the computer I’ll have a single large external drive which holds all the data easily accessible If I need to use it. I think for me that offers the easiest solution.


For yourself though … at 250GB that’s not really a lot of data, so the online option isn’t a bad idea. Plus upgrade your external drive to something newer and you’d be sorted. ( i just bought a 1TB samsung T7 drive for about £70 … small, sturdy, fast, it’s great ).

 

[siclilmonkey]

All my important data is on my NAS, this are nightly synced to another NAS(older model) to protect against hardware failure. I take a backup copy on a External USB every few months and store it off site. Have considered online storage but not to keen on the monthly cost (about 15GB Data)

 

[Mel_P]

All my important data is on my NAS, this are nightly synced to another NAS(older model) to protect against hardware failure. I take a backup copy on a External USB every few months and store it off site. Have considered online storage but not to keen on the monthly cost (about 15GB Data)

Ditto - make a copy to a HDD on and HP Proliant server of RAW files + edited jpgs. Then after a few photo photo outings save same to a 6TB "HDD in a USB box" which I then keep (suitably wrapped) in a tin cupboard in the garage. Mel

 

[siclilmonkey]

All my important data is on my NAS, this are nightly synced to another NAS(older model) to protect against hardware failure. I take a backup copy on a External USB every few months and store it off site. Have considered online storage but not to keen on the monthly cost (about 15GB Data)

NAS to NAS is automated so i cant forget to do it. Not found a simple way to automate the external drives yet. Suppose cloud storage would do that.

 

[Snapshot]

I use a variant of the NAS-to-NAS method described above but it's not a cheap solution.
As a cheap option with some resilience you could buy several external disks and back-up to them in turn. It's up to you to decide how many copies you think are required and at what interval........

 

[spile]

I use Onedrive (I dont pay for additional space) to back up photos to my PC. The files on the PC are automatically synced to my Qnap NAS with QSync and HBS3.

 

[mrk]

HDDs can have a tendency to fail more often with the more power on off cycles given, also if you manage to drop a HDD one day whilst going to get it for a run, then cross all fingers

For me I have an 8TB Samsung 870 series SATA SSD in a Ugreen USB 3.1 Type-C enclosure. I run backups once a month and my main OS drive is cloned over to it as a VHD image, then my documents/photos SSD is synchronised to it respectively.

Because my data is stored on its own NVMe and OS/apps are on the primary, my backup solution is effectively two-fold, if the OS tanks, my data is still there on the other drive, if the documents drive tanks then the backup is there with the PS and apps all good.

I will casually look at cloud backup storage for a third backup for the backups drive to back up onto, just for absolute peace of mind now that I have 900Mbit upload speeds but not quite sure which service offers the most storage up to 8TB for the least ££ yet. Probably won't bother though as my current backup methodology is a fair solution.

You can buy the 870 8TB for £340, or could recently when I checked.

 

[Big Bang]

Thank you all very much everyone for your replies. Certainly some interesting reading.

I should have already said what my existing setup was at the start. I have my main OS is booting up from a Crucial SSD and the Samsung HDD is what I use for saving my photos and videos.

I'm thinking about possibly going for purchasing 2 x SSDs. 1 to go inside my existing PC in the existing PC and use it as an additional/backup drive to my existing Samsung. (Is having 2 SSD and 1 HDD in the PC a good or bad idea?) and purchasing an external SSD caddy for the other SSD for "offline" backups. Should the worst happen to my PC e.g. a power surge or theft.

Again I am very grateful for the replies to my query.

 

[PaulM]

Any important photos/docs I have on an external HDD, synced to a encrypted Hetzner storage box (£3/TB/mo) and then manually back them up to another HDD every few weeks which is stored elsewhere. Probably overkill but I started storing the separate drive elsewhere when we had a house fire which took out most of my stuff

 

[Rozzy85]

For just 250GB of data? Cloud storage combined with some external HDDs or SSDs is more than enough for that.

 

[OspreyO]

My photos (only) are about 360GB.

Recent backups/working folders on a pair of external encrypted 500GB SSDs. Then older backups at, months/ years old on external portable hard drives.

I've had recordable DVDs fail over time, and if you get a bit of corruption on a drive, you can inadvertently copy it to other drives. So it's useful to have a multiple off line older copies. Same with viruses and hacks.

I've had some of my oldest or heaviest used drives, usb drives and SSDs, become unreliable. So I retired/replaced some of them.

I tried the cloud route but found it too slow if you've lots of changes.