I use an app that auto saves my photos to a hard drive that plugged into my router. The whole family has this app on their phone. We also have google photos as a backup cloud. And one more back up is a SanDisk usb c thumb drive with their back up software that we run once a month or so.
So three backups.
My personal choice is expensive but versatile: NAS (network attached storage).
I use a 2-bay NAS with RAID-1, meaning that all data is saved to two disks. Should one disk fail, the other still has a copy of all of the data. Of course, this still doesn’t protect the data from theft, earthquakes, fires, or similar events.
If you are a little tech-savvy or not tech-savvy but patient enough to carefully read the instructions, Synology NAS is the safe bet (many options for different budgets). It has photo management apps builtin as well as phone apps for automatic upload.
If you are very tech-savvy and at minimum a little familiar with command line interfaces, TrueNas or UnRaid are other cheaper options but you need to provide your own hardware and install your own photo management system. I use “Immich”.
If you are neither tech-savvy nor patient, bite the bullet and pay for good cloud storage, no way around it.
Avoid QNAP and those cheap Buffalo NAS, it’s bad and unsafe. I would not trust anything besides Synology, TrueNas or Unraid.
If those photos are really important, have a backup also (storage is not backup). On Synology you can have USB backup relatively easily, connect a USB disk to it and prepare a backup task, there are easy instructions online. Do not keep the backup media permanently connected, remove the media after the backup is finished and store in a different place (preferentially safe from fires, floods, earthquakes and robbers).
3 comments
I use an app that auto saves my photos to a hard drive that plugged into my router. The whole family has this app on their phone. We also have google photos as a backup cloud. And one more back up is a SanDisk usb c thumb drive with their back up software that we run once a month or so.
So three backups.
My personal choice is expensive but versatile: NAS (network attached storage).
I use a 2-bay NAS with RAID-1, meaning that all data is saved to two disks. Should one disk fail, the other still has a copy of all of the data. Of course, this still doesn’t protect the data from theft, earthquakes, fires, or similar events.
If you are a little tech-savvy or not tech-savvy but patient enough to carefully read the instructions, Synology NAS is the safe bet (many options for different budgets). It has photo management apps builtin as well as phone apps for automatic upload.
If you are very tech-savvy and at minimum a little familiar with command line interfaces, TrueNas or UnRaid are other cheaper options but you need to provide your own hardware and install your own photo management system. I use “Immich”.
If you are neither tech-savvy nor patient, bite the bullet and pay for good cloud storage, no way around it.
Avoid QNAP and those cheap Buffalo NAS, it’s bad and unsafe. I would not trust anything besides Synology, TrueNas or Unraid.
If those photos are really important, have a backup also (storage is not backup). On Synology you can have USB backup relatively easily, connect a USB disk to it and prepare a backup task, there are easy instructions online. Do not keep the backup media permanently connected, remove the media after the backup is finished and store in a different place (preferentially safe from fires, floods, earthquakes and robbers).