External Hard Drive

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1. Magnetic storage is known to degrade its information storage after a long period of time...so it is good practice to have the data is magnetically refreshed by transferring that data so it is rewritten.
2. Harddrives do have a Mean Time Between Failure, particularly if it is always energized and spinning; some drives go into sleep mode, and stop spinning, if they are not accessed for a period of time.
3. Even data stored on solid state memory (e.g. SSD) has a finite life, so it is good practice to have the data is magnetically refreshed by transferring that data so it is rewritten.

runswithsizzers said:

yes, yes, and yes, with a couple of caveats

First, backup your entire hard drive -- or at the very least, all of you photos -- NOW! Personally, I would back up to two different external hard drives and keep them in different locations. Or you might consider some kind of "cloud" storage for one of your two backups.

You have a Mac, so you could use the Time Machine backup software that every Mac comes with -- all you need is an external hard drive. Time Machine backs up everything, not just your photos. I would recommend that an external hard drive intended for use with Time Machine have at least twice the storage capacity of the hard drive in your computer.

If you want to backup only your photos, then how you do that may depend on what kind of software you use to edit / catalog your photos. For example, I use Adobe Lightroom Classic for editing and organizing my photos. If I find the folders that Lightroom uses to store my photos, and I then copy those photos to an external hard drive, that will backup my photos -- but not any edits which I have made in Lightroom. When you edit a photo in a non-destructive editor like Lightroom, the editing instructions are kept in another file (catalog), and the edits don't get written to the files until you Export the photo. The original files are left untouched, just as they came out of the camera.

One way to be sure you are backing up EDITED versions of your photos would be to first Export them as TIFFs or high quality JPEGs, and then copy those exported versions to the external drive(s).

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Trail Images said:

I backup all my processed images to 2 external My Book Western-Digital 4 tera bite drives. Most recently the main drive in my PC was starting to make noise and slow down. Got it copied over to a new SSD and all is well. Nothing lost to date with over 30+ years of stuff on storage.

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Alan Edward Klein said:

The Lightroom files that back up the edits are called IRCAT. I backup those files along with the original image files. Each time I exit LR, I get a request to backup or not. The last backup of course covers the latest edits in LR. So you;d also need the IRCAT file if your computer fails.

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Nikon 2 said:

Do you have to copy each image separately or can all photos in albums be done simultaneously…

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Kino said:

Backing up files can be extremely complicated or extremely simple. Just find a system that meets your comfort zone and do it faithfully.

It all depends on your relationship to the data and how much you value the content.

If you are backing up your main OS hard drive, a practice restore to a spare drive is helpful to perform, so you will be familiar with the process. Generic SSDs have become very affordable and will suffice for practice runs.

Performing a drive clone while the main drive is still healthy, but getting older, is also a good way to extend the life of the main OS installation. You can then use the old OS drive as a scratch drive for random storage.

When the emergency "for real" crisis hits, you won't be flying blind and know what to do.

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Nikon 2 said:

Do you have to copy each image separately or can all photos in albums be done simultaneously…

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runswithsizzers said:

What are these "albums"? Are you talking about albums you have created within some kind of editing software like iPhoto or Apple Photos? Or are you talking about an ordinary folder which was created on the desktop using your MacOS system software? If you are talking about Albums as they exist within iPhoto or Apple Photos, then you will probably need to Export those albums to folders which can then be copied to an external drive.

When you mount an external hard drive on a Mac, an icon for that hard drive should appear on your Desktop. The easiest way to copy a folder full of photos to the external drive would be to simply select the icon for that folder and drag it to the icon for the external drive.

I would not use the same external hard drive for both Time Machine backups and also any other drag-and-drop file additions. Time Machine likes to have the whole drive, or at least a whole partition on that drive, reserved for its exclusive use. So get a second external drive if you want to manually backup your folders of photos as described above.

That Time Machine backup to the Seagate external drive is a good first step!!

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Nikon 2 said:

Believe it or not, I was able to backup everything on my computer especially the photos to the Seagate external drive…

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Pieter12 said:

If you can back up your entire computer to a 1TB drive, I would suggest the following depending on how important the photos are. I assume by the lack of a previous back-up, these are personal photos, not for any clients. A 1 TB drive is relatively inexpensive today and you could buy another and make a secondary back-up. I would even suggest an SSD as a redundant back-up. If these were client files, I would put them on a cloud server or at least rotate the two back-up drives between locations: home and a remote one such as a relative's house or office. That way if a disaster were to strike, you still have the files. Another option would be to burn the files to DVDs. Although I have heard about "digital rot" on DVD, I nor anyone I know has actually experienced it. Sure DVDs can be physically damaged, but as back-ups in a sleeve or case, that is unlikely to happen.

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BrianShaw said:

Did you copy folders/files or are you using some sort of backup software? A long time ago I used a Microsoft application, which I now can't recall the name, to backup to an external hard drive. It worked fast because it did incremental backup and synching but that seeems to have died after Windows10. I'm currently using Norton360 for backup to "the cloud" but not really too enchanted with that as I'm a bit of a control freak and would also like to have my own local copy.

EDIT: SyncToy

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MurrayMinchin said:

*Knuckle dragging lout alert*

We have ours double backed up on a Drobo 5D. We also have Amazon Prime (live in an out of the way place with no movie theatre) which allows unlimited raw photos in their cloud storage. Yah...nothing is for free and they are using peoples photos for their nefarious research reasons, but we have nothing to hide.

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