Sign up for Backblaze so that you can backup to the cloud. Then get a 5TB HDD for local backup (to replace your 2TB drive). I like OWC (if you’re on Mac). Then keep your working files on your internal hard drive (just the files that are recent that you want to edit, periodically move them to the 5TB drive for archiving). No, copying doesn’t affect image quality.
this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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An SSD will get you speed, not safety.
You should really be following a pattern that allows for MULTIPLE copies of photos, not speed of access to photos.
Let’s look at the workflow: You go and take pictures of something and everything exists on the memory card.
Ideally you are:
- importing those pictures into something like Lightroom onto your local workstation
- Lightroom offers a ‘secondary location’ so it’s copying to an external drive or NAS (but that is still vulnerable)
- you have a cloud back up solution that is then backing those up to an offsite location as they appear.
That’s means you have 3 locations for your photos (not including the original memory card) and one of those is offsite so if your house burns down, you’re still good.
So, what does this mean for your current solution? You can buy another external drive, preferably two or three times the size of what you have now. You can expand your storage (but not necessarily make it redundant).
Depending on your finances, I’d buy a larger external drive (to increase the size) and something like a Synology NAS with 2 or 4 drives. They give you the ability to lose a disk and not lose all your data before you can replace it. With this, you are importing pictures to one device and duplicating to another. If your PC/drive goes down, you have everything on a NAS.
Looking at things like Backblaze, you can automatically back up to the cloud from your NAS.
It’s not exactly cheap to start but set ups like this give you the ability to recover in case of disaster.
How do I know? Don’t ask me for pictures from 2011 to 2013….I might not get them. I had a NAS fail and lost a bunch. I had some in the cloud so I could get those back but, had I followed the strategy of “3 local copies, 2 backup and 1 offsite”, I’d have them all.
Ask yourself as well: “How many of those tens of thousands do I need?”. I have tens of thousands and some of them are of sporting events that have multiple shots that are similar. I don’t need them all.
Now, as far as quality: if you copy pictures from one drive to another, it’s bit for bit …. No loss in quality. It’s the same pic. Copying to iCloud or Google photos, however, you are likely to lose quality.
Oh man, this is all fantastic information! Currently my workflow is the below:
°Import photos into folder on external HDD °Import photos from HDD folder into Lightroom °Edit in Lightroom, export back into HDD folder
I thiiiink my mobile photos on my phone itself are backed up to Google Photos and Amazon Photos, but I don't know about those on my desktop.
I just looked into Backblaze, seems to be a good price for what it does.
If I can't afford a Synology, is a large HDD from WD or similar just as effective? When working properly, of course.
Scroll down the sub. There are hundreds of posts about this.
I am using IDrive Photos app to backup all photos/videos.Its doing great for me. when the storage is full i do backup on cloud storage and the backup will go as orginal quality.