SHould I use an external harddrive?

[luvmyfam444]

For home use only - just need to back up a few thousand pics - not really anything else of importance.

Or do you think there is a better way? I was using CD's - thought about just using jumpdrives - but I 'm afraid of misplacing them all.

 

[pozey]

I would most definitely suggest using an external hard drive. I use it to store my pictures.

You can get a 1 Terabyte external hard drive for around a hundred bucks. That's CHEAP!!

I have a 250 GB external I bought about a year ago. It's nearly full.

 

[BernardandMissBianca]

you really should do multiple sources of back up. I have an external hard drive and CDs. I keep a set of CD's at my moms and one at home.

I lost 30,000 photos last year when my iPhoto account was accidentally deleted. DH took 3 days to recover about 90% of them. I cried for days, I was so mad at myself.
I now run a back up at least once a week. Which btw thanks for the reminder, I just plugged my hard drive in.

 

[luvmyfam444]

A TB sounds HUGE! Do I really need that much room?

 

[FireDancer]

It is important to keep in mind that burnable CDs are not permanent. Depending on the storage conditions you are looking at as little as a 5 year lifecycle.

It is best to have 2 different backups. One on-site and one off-site. The off-site backup really should be encrypted but if it is only pictures it may noT be necessary. If you are also backing up anything like receipts or anything with financial data it should be.

The best backup for on-site is a hard drive while off-site it can be a hard drive you bring to another location or it could be cloud storage like Amazon S3 (using Jungle Disc to locally encrypt) or even Carbonite. If you are using a hard drive for the off-site storage the best encryption is TrueCrypt.

The thing to keep in mind is that backup is for 3 reasons. The first is accidental deletion and that can be handled with the on-site backup. The second is a hard drive crash which can also be restored via the on-sit backup. The third reason is disaster recovery. If the house burns down, is destroyed in an earthquake, or someone breaks in and steals everything (including the on-site backup) the off-site backup is needed.

Hard Drives are so cheap it is sick so there is no reason not to get one. You can buy a pre-built 1TB for about $100.

 

[Darsa]

We have two hard drives at home; one for each of us, and we both have our photos on each of them. I'm very careful about my pictures

I also do a lot of computer graphics artwork, and I keep the stuff I do on my hard drive, as well as using some of the software (Poser) directly from the hard drive. And a TB sounds like a lot, and it IS, but it's really awesome to have all the extra space.

 

[manning]

I backup on external HD and CD and have recently gone to DVD. I date the CD/DVD so that after 4-5 years I burn a new one.

Flash drives are now coming down in price and have the advantage of not having a spinning disk.

 

[luvmy3]

yes!!!!!