Where can i store my photos?

Question

I recebtly started a Photography hobby and i have a lot of images on my computer. Where can i store them, so that if something happens to my laptop, i wont lose them? Also, if i upload them to Google photos, will i be the only one seeing them, or other people can see them too?

Answer 1

hard drive

Answer 2

On an external hard drive. Maybe buy one of 1 terabyte. Cloud storage is all very well but... you have you know it works. I have just read of a person who thought his work was being backed up by his internet company, but it was not.



I back up to one drive every 10 days, and to another every month.

Answer 3

Most of us with a serious interest in photography use external hard drives, storing duplicates of all files on separate drives. It's up to you how far you take this, but professionals and advanced amateurs often store a backup off-site too. I never reformat a memory card until I've copied the contents to at least two drives. Hard drives are good value for the storage capacity they provide. Just make sure you buy drives with USB3. My current working storage is four 5TB drives, and several more of mainly 2TB containing archived work.



There's a lot of promotion of cloud storage but I don't recommend it. Cloud places you at the mercy of the hosting company's competence, and internet availability. It's also a lot slower than local storage media. With your own backed-up drives you know you can always access your files by just plugging into another computer.

Answer 4

I would suggest that you have multiple backups. Put one copy of all of your images on an external hard drive, and put a second copy on the cloud such as dropbox. This way you can access your photos from anywhere in the world. Having a hard drive will allow you to quickly recover your photos in the event that your hard drive in your computer should die, or you should loose the laptop, or if it should get stolen or damaged some how. Downloading from a cloud service like dropbox should be your last resort since this could take a great deal of time and you may even end up having to pay your ISP for the large amount of downloaded data.



In a perfect world you'd have all of your data backup on an external hard drive and then store that drive off site. This could be in the trunk of your car, or at a relative's or friend's house. If you should have a fire or you get robbed, for example, it's possible that your laptop and your backup drive would both be lost. This is why you want to store a copy off site.



Another option to an external hard drive is a Drobo. A Drobo is a $400 box that accepts multiple hard drives (not included). It uses a RAID system that allows you to recover your data in the event that one of the drives fails. If a drive fails, all you need to do is replace the drive and the Drobo will use its RAID system to restore any lost data. Due to it's initial cost, most people don't go with a Drobo unless they are professionals or have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of images.

Answer 5

you can upload them to Google photos or Microsoft Onedrive. both will keep them private unless you indicate them to be shared with others

Answer 6

If I were you I'd print them all out and hide them under my bed, or put them in an old shoebox and place 'em on top of the wardrobe. Another method is to copy them all, individually, by drawing them onto photo-sized pieces of paper.