Data storage

Hello everyone!
I'm in search of a good solution for storing my photos and videos. I've been eyeing the Western Digital My Passport external hard drive. But I'm curious, how trustworthy is this approach? Do I need to make a backup?
How do you all typically store your data?

Anywhere you store photos has the potential to fail. So you need a good strategy. An external HDD or SSD will be more resilient than a USB stick.
You should store your photos in at least two separate devices. CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMS are very cost effective.
If you no longer have a CD/DVD drive, external models are not expensive. If you have a desktop, it's easy to install a drive.

With more cash available, you could consider a NAS (Network Addressable Storage). This holds one or more HDDs or SSDs and could be connected to the router or a range extender, where is will be accessible to any computers, tablets or phones in your network including wifi.

I'm using a NAS that I bought on eBay for £80. But I also pay a little to have many gigabytes on Google drive. Stuff 'in the cloud' won't be lost if your house burnt down!

In summary, store in CDs, DVDs or external drives AND in the cloud.

As to Western Digital drives, I've had a couple 1TB and a 500GB for a few years and no issue with them. Also have a Toshiba and have put Seagate HDDs in portable cases. All rely on power and data from the USB port/cable. The drives themselves are pretty much the same as used in Notebooks. The physically-larger USB drives are the same as used in Desktops and can be portable but they also have their own power supply.

I have two storage drives that i used to backup very important files on both storage drive i know i won't be live to see both storage drives fail same time if it does then i'm very unlucky person should not play any betting games.

I have several WD drives that started out in External drive enclosures, where the logic in the enclosure Failed. Trustworthy? I think not.

Henry, you don't say what your computer is, all you say is Windows 10. And you're on a Windows 11 forum. ???

If you have a desktop PC you can probably install a second HD or SSD inside the case. Laptop? That's a whole different matter.

Some, well meaning souls, will tell you that Flash Drives are not reliable, but in my own experience they are VERY reliable and cheap too! I've been using them since day one, and I've not lost one yet. I have maybe a dozen or more of the little buggers, and they range from 64MB to 1TB. All of my own pictures and docs are backed up to Flash Drives.

Good Luck Mate!
TM

I have had multiple flash drives fail, especially cheaper SDHC ones but also thumb drives.

I also use USB Thumb drives, only failure I had was I got too impatient to wait for Safely Remove to finish its work and corrupted some files. For portability I now use a 1TB Samsung EVO 970 NVMe 2280 in a Sabrent USB 3 case. The only issue I've had with SDHC memory cards for my cameras was with not being readable in the older SD readers/slots which have a limit of 2GB, if necessary I reformat them only in the camera.

I have had many usb cards or SDHC become read-only and I can't trust them not to become unreadable, so I normally bin them.

The other solution for "safe" storage is a cloud provider, of which there are no shortage of providers from Apple to Google, Dropbox and even AWS. There is - of course - an associate expense. If multiple TB's are required, then local storage is more cost effective, but as mentioned above, they are prone to failures over time (experienced that myself) no matter the vendor being WD or Seagate or...
AWS Glacier is "cheap" to store, but they charge for retrieval. Apple, DB and Google charge by the GB (IIRC).
Depending on volume, it might be worth looking into?

Henry said:

Do I need to make a backup?

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Yes.

Henry said:

How do you all typically store your data?

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My data, including photos, is on my computers' disks and also backed up to two external disks.
If I had a fast internet connection I would certainly consider a single backup disk & a cloud storage backup.


When you need to buy a disk [HDD / SSD / M.2 card / USB memory stick / SD memory card] for backups, go to the maker's website and find the 'datasheet' / 'spec sheet' which they will post on their website or provide for download so you can check its reliability data.
This will probably be expressed as Mean time to failure (Hrs) [MTTF] - the longer the better. It is a good factor to use when comparing your choices.
{We used to call this Mean time between failures - MTBF}
And while you're at it, check the warranty. If they offer a 5 year warranty, which is quite common, then it means they think it will last that long without failing. That's also a good factor to use when comparing disks.
Personally,
- If I cannot find the maker's website then I judge the disks to be unreliable.
- If I cannot find the MTTF/MTBF then I judge the disks to be unreliable.
- If the maker's warranty is unknown or is less than five years then I judge the disks to be unreliable.
- If the maker's warranty requires you to pay for return postage on a non-refundable basis then choose a different brand.

An additional factor to consider is how you will use the backup disks.
- If you are always on the go then the convenience of USB memory sticks might matter more to you than the greater reliability of external HDDs/SSDs.

As long as you have two backup disks and the ability to replace defective ones quickly, you will be well protected.
- Kelper's experience of duff disks is quite common. The first fault with USB memory sticks & SD cards is typically for them to become read-only [they might remain readable for a decade afterwards but that's hardly useful].


All the best,
Denis

kelper said:

I have had multiple flash drives fail, especially cheaper SDHC ones but also thumb drives.

Click to expand...

Same here.

Henry said:

Hello everyone!
I'm in search of a good solution for storing my photos and videos. I've been eyeing the Western Digital My Passport external hard drive. But I'm curious, how trustworthy is this approach?

Click to expand...

I've had really good luck with Seagate and Western Digital external hard drives. My current external drive for storing my Macrium backups is an 8TB WD Essentials drive. It's fast, quiet and has been going strong since 2019.

Henry said:

Do I need to make a backup?
How do you all typically store your data?

Click to expand...

Yes you want a backup. You never want your data in a single location. Things like pictures and videos to me are far more important than things like TV shows, etc. So, without a doubt, i would make sure that the data is backed up.

I have a small box acting as a file server at home. It stores a ton of my older historical data. It has a primary SATA drive that stores the data. It has a second physical hard drive that stores a 7 day rotation of my data. I have a folder for each day of the week, and I use robocopy to mirror my source data drive to the daily secondary drive to protect against the source drive failing. This way I can go back and recover from an accident for up to a week.

In addition to that, I I also run Macrium from time to time and backup my servers source drive as an image and store it on the 8TB WD drive. And I typically have a second external hard drive that I keep a copy of the first drive on that is stored offsite (in case my house burns down...my sisters did).


For most of my new data, things are stored in OneDrive. I have Office365, so I get 6 accounts with each having 1TB. I have all my families cell phones backing up all phones and videos to their onedrive folders. This way, we have copies on their devices, and also in the cloud, so if anything happens to their device, nothing is lost.

I store most of my data files now in OneDrive as well. This way it's available on all my machines, my phone, I can access from work, and I can get to from a web browser if I am on the go. This means most files are local on my machine at home and in the cloud. This protects me from having a single source failure.

There are many online services that would take all your digital photos and print them or make a book with them. These make great gifts. The subject could be family, holidays, celebrations, significant milestones or even pets.
Much better than the old albums where all the piccies fell out!

Henry said:

Hello everyone!
I'm in search of a good solution for storing my photos and videos. I've been eyeing the Western Digital My Passport external hard drive. But I'm curious, how trustworthy is this approach? Do I need to make a backup?
How do you all typically store your data?

Click to expand...

There's also the connectivity and the speed of which you can copy the items too.
You should also consider which port you will be using for the adapter to connect too.
I have a WD My book 4 TB which is going on 6 years now and so far, the last time
I verified it with the WD Drive Utilities, it came back as a pass. But, this will require a
external power supply.
I also have a WD Elements 5TB which is a portable drive and connects to USB 3 port
so, you can use it on any PC or notebook if you travel with it.
I only use USB flash drives on occasion if I really have to travel with a few tools to help
someone out.
As mentioned by @kelper , an cloud storage subscription would make sense if you are
a photographer and need those files to be kept in a safe place.

I have some older classical SATA drives connected to a NAS as a RAID 0 20 TB array. More than enough storage for what I need.

Every so often I back up to cloud etc.

The MDADM software RAID 0 on the Linux host allows me to use old HDD's with different capacities to act as a "huge" aggregate single drive and these days modern "Spinners" are quite reliable for this sort of stuff -- i.e don't run the O/S on them but backups, multimedia etc etc.

Some RAID systems insist on similar capacity HDD's or only use the aggregate of the smallest disks --decent Linix systems today with mdadm (Software RAID) allow use of the mix of any size HDD's, - So you don't need to junk old spinners.

Anyway on the screenshot look at /mnt/DV3.



Cheers
jimbo

Thanks to everyone for your insights and suggestions!
As for NAS, I've done some reading on it, and it does seem like a solid choice. However, I was looking for something a bit more compact. But, if NAS is superior in reliability I should definitely think about it!

Henry said:

Thanks to everyone for your insights and suggestions!
As for NAS, I've done some reading on it, and it does seem like a solid choice. However, I was looking for something a bit more compact. But, if NAS is superior in reliability I should definitely think about it!

Click to expand...

There are quite a few proprietary "QNAP" type NAS boxes around which might come also in a small footprint. These could be expensive, are fairly inflexible and need a bit of setting up though.

Another cheap solution -- why not get a cheap used laptop, run Windows 10 on it (no probs then even with old hardware on it), attach some HDD's / SSD's via a multi-port powered USB adapter and simply share the drives or whatever. You don't need the most modern hardware or software to run things HOME based NAS boxes are usually used for.

Cheers
jimbo

On two Desktop PCs with secondary Internal HDDs for storage, then backed up on two external drives.

Henry said:

As for NAS, I've done some reading on it, and it does seem like a solid choice

Click to expand...

You are absolutely correct. NAS is a choice.
So is inviting round the Brigade of Guards to guard your house.

Henry said:

But, if NAS is superior in reliability

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It's the individual disks bought & having two of them that achieve reliability.


Denis

Try3 said:

You are absolutely correct. NAS is a choice.
So is inviting round the Brigade of Guards to guard your house.


It's the individual disks bought & having two of them that achieve reliability.


Denis

Click to expand...

the weakness with that argument is easy to spot -- if the HOST machine i.e laptop or whatever is unavailable you are in that well known street without a paddle.If you don't have a working computer then all the disks in the world won't help you if you can't reach them.

Using a separate NAS makes it much more unlikely that TWO computers will be out of commission at the same time -- also things like NAS's can have all sorts of mirroring and data recovery software etc which aids recovery in the case of HDD failures.

Cheers
jimbo