Because our internet is so unbearably slow that it’s unreasonable to do any kind of online backup (like iCloud or whatever) for photos, we back all our family photos up to an external hard drive then, on a monthly basis I copy it to what I call the traveling drive and take it in to my office, where I keep yet another external hard drive whose only purpose is host a redundant copy of my family photos.
Why? In 2005, I had a hard drive die on my computer during the last week of the semester. It had every single digital picture of my first kid, who was just a year old at the time. I paid $2400 at the time to have the drive recovered and have had at least one or more copies of all important things all over the place since.
But. I want to slowly move to SSD. I figured by now the prices would drop some and I’d be able to find a good deal on a SSD that I can slap in an enclosure.
Any of yall have ideas on what I might want to look at?
I was impressed with the Samsung T5 and when the time came to purchase a new external drive purchased the T7. Have been very happy with both and have had no issues.
I have three of the older generation of these, and they work fine.
And, a pedantic question: are you copying to the drive at your workplace, or rotating the drives out? Rotating would give you another month of history in case a file came up missing or corrupt.
Personally, I would also have another drive that only enters the rotation at a longer interval, like 6 months or a year. Perhaps at a third location, like a bank vault.
Rotation schemes can become complex, but the “three tape Hanoi” scheme on this Wikipedia page might suffice. (Notice my deliberate use of the weasel word “might” ) Of course your interval would be months, rather than days.
Going SSD for these things is well worth the price. I resisted for years and used spinning drives because “they’re just redundant backups” but having the backups complete in 1/10 of the time is so much nicer. So you’re on the right track by going SSD.
I have several of the Sandisk drives that @JohnAtl recommended above and can fully recommend them also.
Complete units like the Samsung T7 are the way to go. While a spinning drive does fine for backups, there’s nothing like having a SSD when you’re in disaster recovery mode.
I have a 2017 iMac with a 2T Fusion drive and was getting more and more frustrated with the slow speed of the drive. I picked up an external 2T Thunderbolt 3 OWC Envoy Pro FX ( OWC Envoy Pro FX - The Fastest, Most Compatible Drive Ever Made ), which I’m now using as the boot drive for the iMac. It’s awesome, just like having a brand new iMac.And using an external bus-powered drive is so much easier than trying to open the iMac to replace the internal disk, or sending the iMac off somewhere to have it professionally done.
So my home one is updated regularly. I keep a second drive I call the mobile drive and once a week I copy the photos from the main drive to the mobile drive. Depending on the time of year (I teach at a community college, we’ve been on covid so it’s only been once a month), I take the mobile drive to work and copy the files to my work hard drive. In the past, it was every 2 weeks or so but since April of 2019, it’s been about once a month.
We’ve talked about adding another drive at my wife’s work and doing that every so often. We run macs everywhere, so it’s not rocket science. In fact, I typically leave it to work overnight, set it up Monday, take it home Tuesday (when not in covid).
The challenge with a 1tb is that these damn photo libraries get so big… I think the current library is nearing 1 tb alone.
Im mixed. The nice thing with internal SSDs is I can pop them in an enclosure or one of those drives thats just set up to hot swap them in and out. The ones that are pre-enclosed are more of a pain to deal with if something goes south, typically between the USB plug on the box and the drive itself.
Costco has a SanDisk NVMe 2TB Extreme Portable SSD (the brand mentioned by @JohnAtl) on sale for $240. I also have a few of the older models and they’re working fine for me.
I agree with this, but then I think back to how many times I’ve had an issue and it’s possibly not to much of an issue. Also, I’ve got the internal SATA drives and they’re slower than the all in ones - also depends on the quality of the enclosure.
Several of the well-known brands have been silently downgrading their products, after sending the high-end drives to reviewers. Specs may differ from what you expect.
Thanks for the link. When I went to Best Buy recently for yet another (spinning) backup disk drive, I was surprised at the unclear and incomplete specs on the packaging. Lying by omission is just another way to lie.
) Of course your interval would be months, rather than days.