You said you wanted 500GBs to 1TB… I’d recommend going with a 2TB drive, as it doubles your space for only an extra $10-20. Entirely your choice.
I agree. You’re much better off with a little extra space, than with a little lack of space. 🙂 And I definitely second the motion for more than one drive, with one cloning the other for redundancy.
@loganlamar From what I can see, Carbon Copy Cloner is for Apple products (Macs) only. What about those of us who use Windows machines? 🙂 I personally just recently started using FreeFileSync for backups of my photos and documents to external drives. [This just reminded me that I hadn’t run a backup for several weeks, so I went and did it right now while I’m thinking about it…] Once you get FFS set up properly, it’s just a matter of running the job once in a while, and it automatically updates everything.
I currently do all my editing from my laptop’s internal SSD for better performance. Then after a few weeks have passed, and it is not likely I’ll need quick access to those pictures any longer, I’ll archive them to my main “Photos” folder on an external HDD. I just drag and drop them from WITHIN Lightroom so that Lightroom doesn’t lose track of them. Then I use FreeFileSync to sync that external drive to another one so that I have more than one copy. (That 2nd backup drive is kept in a fire-proof safe whenever I’m not using it)
The most important things to remember about backups are these:
- NEVER only have 1 copy of your data
- Run backups OFTEN
- Don’t store your backup in the same location as your laptop or “main” drive.
We learned the hard way when our house burned that backups are useless if they get burned up along with everything else. Thankfully, the Lord was merciful and our backup drive was recoverable and still functional!! Needless to say, we do try to be a little more careful with our data now…