Definitely not the right place for this, but I’m yet to find the right place. I need an SSD/HDD that can store about 10 years worth of family photo and video. I was looking at that Samsung rugged SSD, but it’s a little above my price range right now. I’e like to have at least a terabyte for future photos so I don’t have to worry about this again for a while. Any reliable options?
On top of any local thing you do, you should strongly consider some type of cloud backup. (BackBlaze has a good price.) Even if you have 2 redundant drives at home that you backup to, what happens in the event of a fire while you are out? Those drives are now equally roasted. If you care enough and can take the cost, you should always try to have a backup thats at a separate location from your home/primary storage.
Actually, the main reason I’m doing this is so we can switch away from our Verizon plan, which includes cloud storage. All the photos are there now, but Verizon has been fucking us over for like 10 years and I’m sick of paying for a bunch of bundle bullshit I don’t use.
Noted, though cloud storage and cloud backup aren’t the same. BackBlaze is $70/yr for unlimited backup. Regardless, the main point was just to make sure you’re aware. Many people try to use an external drive as backup for data they really care about without realizing how vulnerable that setup can actually be. As long as you know, then anything after that is your call.
The best place to store it is more than one place. No product can replace this essential procedure.
What is your budget and how much space do you need? I’m seeing 1tb external drives on amazon for about 50 usd.
If you really need a budget option, you could get a sata usb cable and make use of any old hard drives laying around.
I also recommend backing up to a cloud for reliability.
There are multiple options
- Cloud storage is popular these days (has it’s disadvantages)
- External HDDs (portable, but needs care when moving as simple drop can damage it), I had good results with WD drives
- External SSDs (overkill for cold storage like you described)
- Internal HDDs (depending on your PC configuration, can be the best solution, if portability is not a requirement)
Also, for any storage, the 3-2-1 rule is recommened.
It states that there should be at least 3 copies of the data, stored on 2 different types of storage media, and one copy should be kept offsite, in a remote location (this can include cloud storage).
handy site for finding the lowest price per TB HDD/SSD
It depends a lot on how much space you’re using, how much you need, and the conditions that you’re storing the drive in.
10 years doesn’t really say how many photos there are. It could just as readily be a very small number of photos, or a very big number of photos.
If it’s just going to be sitting in a box on the shelf, an HDD could still work reasonably well, but if it’s going to be in a bag/bumped around, you might want the tougher SSD. The HDD still has the best price per TB value (may differ depending on your country/local market), but for 1TB, the difference is negligible (you’d be looking at maybe $10 - 20 total difference).
@selfhosted may be a good place to ask. Can run your own “cloud” photo backup on a computer so photos taken on phones can automatically be saved. Would also recommend a second drive at friend/family house so you can back-up off-site to follow the 3-2-1 rule (3 copies, 2 different types of storage, 1 offsite) for backups. For even better redundancy for drive failures you could run a NAS running multiple drives in RAID. Basically, RAID combines multiple physical drives into a single “logical” drive with different speed, capacity, and redundancy capability and the NAS allows you to access that over your local network or internet.
It might be a bit backward but some of the most resilient storage methods is writing to blu-ray; storing one copy on location, another in a different location. Amazon’s glacier storage runs on this method. Basically they have giant caddies of blu-rays that they store your information on; that is why they charge such a higher fee for quick retrieval of data. 25-50gb per disk. This in addition to external hard drives, NAS, or cloud backup is my go to.
