The best place to back up pictures on?

[DS9forever]

Do people still say back-up? Anyway, I have old Sony memory cards with vacation photos that I'd like to save to a device. Is a Laptop still the best device to use to save them to? Or are there cheaper devices than a Laptop like an Amazon Fire HD?

 

[Finn]

The cloud. As long as you memorize or have the username and password written down elsewhere, you can access them when your devices go kaboom.

 

[scotpens]

FWIW, I have all my movies, image files and text files backed up on a 2-terabyte external drive that cost me about $65.

 

[think]

I have 2 teraquads that are full and I really need a third one for all of the new stuff in a month I upload 200 gig and then delete it on my drives to make room for the next 200 gig getting created...

 

[RandyS]

For stuff like that my preferred backup is an external hard drive.

 

[Stephen!]

Do people still say back-up? Anyway, I have old Sony memory cards with vacation photos that I'd like to save to a device. Is a Laptop still the best device to use to save them to? Or are there cheaper devices than a Laptop like an Amazon Fire HD?

I'd go with multiple backups, in case any one form of storage fails.
DVD-Rs, internal hard drive, external hard drives, flash drives, memory cards.

 

[Non Sync]

Since most my photos now days are taken on my phone, they're backed up to OneDrive. I try to also keep a copy on a local hard drive. Having copies stored in the cloud covers you if you experience a local disaster (fire, flood, tornado, etc...).

 

[Amaris]

I have my stuff stored on a secondary 4TB HDD, but all of it is backed up onto an 8 TB external HDD that stores *everything*. So there's two places. You could store it on the cloud, but you take your chances with data breaches, or the image host selling your data to third parties. I'm not a fan of the cloud.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

You could store it on the cloud, but you take your chances with data breaches, or the image host selling your data to third parties. I'm not a fan of the cloud.

But it's so fluffy!

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

But it's so fluffy!

I'm with the others that say go with an external HDD (or even SSD). I have more downloaded pics and ripped DVD's than I could ever fit on one drive. Most of it is on at least 2 external drives.

I have a nice Thermaltake 2 bay external SATA dock.

 

[STR]

As someone who has to consider these things professionally:

• External hard drives are not back up.
• Manually moving things to Google Drive is not backup.
• Just using a backup service is not great backup, but if time isn't critical is okay.

You need:

• An automatic process. Manually moving stuff is how things get lost.
• Local redundancy in case of single device failure. This could be another computer (including a server) on a network. It could be external storage, but one that isn't regularly plugged into your PC. You get a crypto virus, it will crawl through and lock up everything.
• Versioning, in case you most recent backups are corrupted or infected. You should be able to go back and grab the last good copy of your system. Again, see crypto viruses. Some of those actually look for older backups and encrypt them too. This is also great if you delete something accidentally.
• Off-site redundancy in case the whole building goes up. This means an app like Backblaze, synced to wherever you keep local backups. Using cloud-only means waiting days or weeks to redownload your data.

Additionally, if you have a family, you don't give everyone the ability to save to a shared folder. Everybody gets their own space, even if you let them look at (but not edit) your stuff. That way, they can only destroy their stuff.

It's 2020. This is a solved problem. You should never lose data.

 

[Amaris]

External hard drives are backup.
Most people don't have the money for off-site servers.

It's 2020, which is about $1900 more than I can spend on backup equipment.