Storage Hard drive

[Blessings Captured]

For a couple months now my file/picture storage drives have been getting dangerously full.

My current system is having two 2T portable, external hard drives that I periodically mirror using SyncBack. For the most part this has work well for me. Recently I heard of “digital bit rot” and was wondering if there was a better system to protect against it.

Here are two systems I’m looking into.

Direct attached storage, DAS
Pros:
Protect against digital bit rot.
All together
Automatically syncs

Cons:
Cost
Not a back-up

External Hard Drive (x2)
Pros:
Cheaper
Back-up in two different locations

Cons:
Inconvenient to back-up
Doesn’t protect from digital bit rot
Have to have two ports to computer

I’d appreciate anyone’s advice or recommendations.

I normally buy electronics from BestBuy or Adorama. Does anyone have any other recommendations for good places to buy?
Thank you.
-Hannah

[Nate Bergen]

Would cloud storage interest you? I store my photos on iCloud (idk what kind of devices you use, but iCloud is really handy if you use Apple devices. Otherwise you’d want to use some other cloud). The disadvantage of cloud storage is that you have to pay a monthly subscription, so in the long run a hard drive (or DAS) would probably be cheaper in most cases. There are a few companies (Koofr, Internxt) that offer a lifetime licence. A lifetime license can be rather expensive, but if you look on stacksocial.com you can often find pretty good deals. I haven’t used external storage much, so idk which of the options you mentioned would be preferable, but I just thought I’d mention cloud storage as an alternative, since that’s what I use. One disadvantage of cloud storage though is that you need an internet connection in order to upload/access the files/photos. Which probably isn’t really a problem in most cases, but might be sometimes. Cloud storage works well for me, but possibly someone else has more advice on what would be your best option

[David Frazer]

There is really only one rule when it comes to storage: have more than one copy. Everything man namde can fail in this fallen world, so ideally you should have more than one copy on more than one medium in more than one location.

Beyond that it all depends how much you are willing to pay to keep your photos. As @nateb mentioned, cloud storage is certainly an option for one of your copies. Magnetic (rotating) hard drives and solid-state (SSD) drives are other medium options. Cloud storage adds the off-site protection as well, but you could also leave one hard drive backup at a friend’s house and swap drives from time to time.

Personally, I have had drives fail completely, but have not yet (as far as I know) had partially corrupted files except on drives that were about to fail or during transfer, so bit rot is not my biggest concern.

[Blessings Captured]

I’ll have to look into cloud storage for an extra backup. Thank you for mentioning it.

That is good to know that corrupted files aren’t very common.

Thank you @nateb and @dfrazer.

[David Tremain]

Some thoughts to keep in mind with any backup system:
1) Backup often – the goal is to have multiple copies of the file(s) on different storage media and in different places, so that if one of them goes bad, you still have a good copy of it on the other. If it isn’t backed up, you don’t have two copies. Things to avoid: “backing up” to the same device (for example, if your internal hard drive is formatted with two partitions, making a backup to the other partition doesn’t help, because both are on the same device – and if the device fails, you lose both copies.)
2) There should be a backup copy separated by a non-trivial distance. Having both the original and the backup in the same room in your house puts all copies at risk to a house-based disaster (fire, flood, water, tornado, theft). Even storing the backup copy at a friend’s house in the same town isn’t ideal – my cousin lived is Paradise, CA during the Campfire Fire. Almost the whole town burned down, including his house, and his mother’s house, which was some distance away.
3) You should try to recover random images from your backup media on a periodic basis. After all, what good does it do to have a backup copy if you can’t retrieve it? That is, after all, the purpose of a backup.
4) Manage your backups. Label the media, keep track of where the backup copies are, and how to access them. If you can’t find it, you haven’t got it!

I use OneDrive (Microsoft’s cloud storage), and store all my images on my local PC. OneDrive offers 1 T cloud storage included in their Office subscription. Apple cloud also has a certain amount of storage for free.

Hardware failure isn’t the worst threat to your images. My biggest loss was from formatting the wrong hard drive when upgrading computers – unaware that it contained the backup (and at that moment, the only copy) of my images.

[Blessings Captured]

thank you @dotremain. Those are some excellent things I’ll keep in mind; especially coming from someone who knows what it’s like to lose images.

[James Staddon]

Oh my, that’s aweful @dotremain! What a miserable realization that must have been.

[Author]

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