I have a 2t toshiba canvio here you can have for £45 posted mate. It's brand new in the box. Yours if you want it. I'm not using it or going to!
You can get cheap drives, but they won't be flash or solid state drives............ ...but do you really need to spend more or do you need network attached storage? I back up all photos to google photos from phone & computer - can be accessed anywhere I also back up stuff to a hard drive at home. If you don't want to lose stuff id back it up in at least two separate places.
I think Microsoft give you 500Gb free per hotmail account...just register a few. There are many many cloud storage options...photo bucket tried to give people a free service then charge them later...a bad business model as it transpires.
Back up multiple places and in separate locations. The cloud is OK but remember Photobucket... Any of the external drives will work for photo backup. You dont need fast, so solid state is a waste of money plus you dont need their tendency to work really well then expire completely without warning.. while sometimes spinning disc ones slow down first before dying. There are only a couple of hard drive manufacturers left in the world. They all make quality products and all will do for occasional use. So just go in PC World and buy one or get one off Amazon. But do copy the files onto new drives from time to time.. magnetic discs and flash drives all suffer from increasing errors with time and a ten year old disc drive may turn out to be working properly but have a high error rate. For instance my RAID5 setup (three 1.5TB discs providing 3TB of storage) spends a lot of its time cross checking the data and copying it back to the discs. Then I back it up once a day to another external 4TB drive box. So far, over about 5 years of 24/7 running two disc drives in the setup have failed but in each case the data was not lost
Great info.. Although slightly beyond me.. I have a 10 year old Mac mini.. The os is struggling with new websites, it gets a small amount of use per day, And I'm looking to rem data and then use a a 27" iMac that's only 4 years old I may (in the future) use the Mac mini to access online content, to display on my projector..
Photobucket isn't a reason to damn the cloud...no one paid for it and were then told to....the fact that people chose not to isn't damning in the technology, it's a poor business model. The cloud absolves the end user of all that ballsing about with hardware, drive mapping, syncing etc....and is usually end device agnostic. I agree the provider choice is important.
I don’t really understand what “The Cloud”. Surely there must be some sort of device involved somewhere along the line. Which could fail. It’s beyond me
I back up any photos and writing to solid state external drives every day, plus back up everything every month to DVDs which are kept off site.
Like the cloud provider a few years back that was recommended to NHS and councils.. went bust and people had to pay large sums to recover vital data. Or Megaupload.com where the servers were siezed by authorities despite legitimate users data being stored alongside the dodgy stuff. Today I would trust Apple, Microsoft,Google or Amazon to not vanish without a lot of publicity. And find somewhere the charges are realistic after the free period.
Megaupload was that German nutter who hid in New Zealand wasn't he? His first incarnation of the service was closed down as it held pirate data in the main, anyone daft enough to use the service legitimately after that when it was widely publicised was asking for trouble. We can disagree quite amicably....there are thousands and thousands of companies happily using cloud services, all day, everyday. I've had hard drives fail, then backups go too. Microsofts webmail system has free storage, you can pay to upgrade if it's not enough, I'm unaware of a free period. Given the issues with local held hardware...failure, damage, theft etc....it strikes me as far less grief to store it in the cloud (which is where I've stored my private and company data happily for the last 6 years), hence my suggestion. I don't own or sponsor cloud services....but I do know being able to access ALL my data (current and archive) from any device that has a browser and Internet anywhere in the world at any time trumps hugely ballsing about through dusty cd boxes, taking apart computers to slave external drives and/or trying to find the power supply for my LaCie USB external - all of which I have to be in my house to do...and if my internet fails I'm scuppered. Just saying.
Yep, there are numerous devices in the cloud - think about a data centre full of computers that share your data and processing requirements...then think of other data centres joined to this....then often, these data centres are spread across the continent. The cloud is less prone to disaster because numerous devices share your requirements dynamically at any one time, across layered power and data lines. It's not bullet proof, but think of it like a swarm of starlings being attacked by a hawk....or think of a non cloud infrastructure as a pigeon toting a big gun and a crash helmet.
Put them in the loft ,they will never get looked at again until you die then you won’t be their to see them laugh
