External Hard Drive for Photo Storage

You most likely have photos everywhere. Your computer. Your old computer. Maybe the computer before that. Digital cameras. Teeny tiny camera cards. Thumb drives. DVDs. Maybe even those old floppy drives!

Mainstream digital photos started around 2005 and we’ve all used many different types of digital storage in just these years. The price of storage devices has come down as they have grown in capacity, but not all of us have been watching where all of those photos ended up. Sometimes we might have copied photos from one place to another, but that only made the mess bigger, since now we’ve almost certainly got duplicates. Now we feel like we have a big mess.

An External Hard Drive (EHD) is one very helpful tool to start to deal with all of your digital photos. There are many brands of EHDs, and for the most part, they are all roughly equal in performance for the average user. An EHD will run about $100 for about 2 Terabytes of storage.

You can use a hard drive as a parking lot to place all of your various photos, wherever they are from. You can gather all of your photos together from your computers, your thumb drives, disks, phones and even downloads from cloud services. This is a great tool because once gathered together, you can then use a software program to remove duplicates, and then you can finally have all of your photos in one place.

If possible, you always want to backup your EHD to another source. Sad but true, computers and EHDs both will break at some point. It’s just how they are made. They could break in 5 minutes, 5 months, or 5 years, you just never know. Don’t take chances, and make sure that you have a backup of what’s on your EHD, even if your EHD is your primary backup. I recommend using the 3-2-1 rule: at least 3 copies of your photos on 2 different types of media, with at least one copy stored off-site.

Now that you have a plan of where all those digital photos should go start collecting all those devices!