Photo Storage Advice

[Vanilla Gorilla]

Hi all! My wife and I are trying to figure out something safe and reliable to store all of our photos on. We have been researching external hard drives, but aren't sure what to get. Is there something better or easier? We are troglodytes with this stuff, so any advice would be appreciated.

[Red Impact]

I have a 1 TB external hard dive that I stored all my stuff on. It's easy to do. You can use a site like photobucket to store things as well.

[Ultimo Gallos]

I got a 3 terabyte Seagate external HD 3 years ago to store all my pictures and video I have shot. It works great and is easy to use. Plus added bonus I can plug it into my Blu Ray and watch my video or view the pictures on my TV.

If you are just storing pictures a 1 Terabyte drive should be more than enough space. Seen them ,decent brands like seagate,for as cheap as 40 bucks.

[DZ: WF Legacy]

Ideally, an external solid state hard drive (which is 'flash' memory over mechanical) is best for long-term storage - especially if this is media of great importance to you. The 128GB-256GB range has finally gone under $100. If you're just storing photos, unless you have an obscene amount of large photos, it should be enough. Basically, these hard drives are considered to be more stable, reliable, and less prone to failure since there's not a bunch of moving parts inside. The big bonus is that they're REALLY fast. My laptop has 256GB SSD on it to supplement the 1TB normal HDD, and I use it to put all my programs on, including Windows. This means my computer turns on and starts up in literal seconds.

I said ideally because you could easily get away with a basic external hard drive, too. And for those, $100 will get you 2TB of storage (which is like 8x the space). I use several external HDDs, and I've never really had any problems with them. Just be sure to not drop them or kick them around accidentally and realistically these should be totally fine.

If you're looking to see your photos on a television for quick viewing, you could go with one of the above and probably be fine (I've done this several times), or you could also use a USB flash drive or SD cards if your tv supports it. Basic storage issues are a thing of the past when it comes to cost, so luckily you can get what would've been considered a crazy expensive amount of space at an insanely low cost these days. I bought a fast 64GB Class 10 SD card last year for shooting video in my camera for like $30. At full HD at 60FPS, the thing can literally hold like 2 hours of of video.

I definitely recommend getting a permanent solution like SSD or a good HDD to serve as a back-up, in addition to another method like a USB dongle. USB dongles are great for portable use and especially tvs since they all have USB ports nowadays, and you can buy a 128GB USB dongle storage for between $30-40 easily. It's always recommended to keep one back-up somewhere safe and have another separate storage medium for regular use. Just depends on your value of the media in question. When it comes to family stuff, I don't mess around - I have back-ups on usb, external HDDs, etc. You could use cloud storage too, which is great for physical catastrophe, but that does open up some security concerns. It's just another option - and clearly there are many!

[Vanilla Gorilla]

Thank you all! I really appreciate the responses. It's amazing how cheap the SD HD cards are now, but with two little ones things like that grow legs. We'll probably go toward the 1 or 2 TB external hard drive.

Any other opinions would continue to be appreciated.