How should I make copies of my family photos?

IR76 · March 30

I've got a significant amount of family photos in one location but I want to store them in other places? Is it just as simple as buy an external hard drive and put the photos on it then give it to a friend or family member to store at their place? Or should I do something else and maybe password protect the drive? I want to make sure I take the right approach to backing up my family photos. Thank you very much.

Needfuldoer · March 30

30 minutes ago, IR76 said:

Is it just as simple as buy an external hard drive and put the photos on it then give it to a friend or family member to store at their place?

An external drive with a copy of the photos stored at a trusted relative's house is a good start.

You could also burn them to archival discs like M-Disc, in case something happens to both drives.

Cloud storage is almost infinitely redundant, but comes with a monthly price tag.

IR76 · March 30

40 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

An external drive with a copy of the photos stored at a trusted relative's house is a good start.

You could also burn them to archival discs like M-Disc, in case something happens to both drives.

Cloud storage is almost infinitely redundant, but comes with a monthly price tag.

I didn't even think about M-discs thank you. Yea while cloud storage is the ideal solution I'm trying to see what I can do for free as I'm not in a current state to keep buying cloud storage monthly. Thank you very much Needfuldoer.

IR76 · March 30

1 minute ago, IR76 said:

I didn't even think about M-discs thank you. Yea while cloud storage is the ideal solution I'm trying to see what I can do for free as I'm not in a current state to keep buying cloud storage monthly. Thank you very much Needfuldoer.

Also I want to get a NAS at somepoint that I can connect to via the internet if I'm ever far away like on holiday for example.

OhioYJ · March 30

My collection was of photos is always growing. So they are always stored across multiple drives here at the house to protect against a drive failure, or just me doing something dumb like accidentally deleting an entire folder (it's happened).

Then I have multiple sets of external drives. Externals won't get zapped by a power surge etc. I also say sets to protect against a single external drive failing. Then a set of externals is always kept offsite (family members house) to protect against say fire etc at my house. Every so often I swap that set out with an updated set.

I found a pelican case that holds a pair of drives nicely:

As for passwords, most of family photos I don't care if people see, in fact if something happens to me I want my family to be able to easily get these, so they are not encrypted on these drives. If someone wants to see my vacation photos have at it. Sensitive information however is on an encrypted partition using Veracrypt.

johnt · March 30

Cloud storage is free for photos if you have Amazon Prime. You might not trust Amazon with your memories, but who is better? Microsoft, Google, Apple, Box?