Our treasured memories are important to us and keeping hold of them is just as vital. Luckily, in this day and age, there are lots of ways to keep your snaps safe from loss, including cloud storage and external hard drives (HD). You will constantly hear arguments about whether it is better to back your content up to the cloud or an external HD; they both have their pros and cons just like anything else. For the sake of this article, we will be looking at external HDs and why they make an excellent choice for storing your cherished family photos. You might be picturing the big bulky drives that used to plug into your old computer, but don’t be put off because you can get external SSD drives that are smaller than your average phone and transfer data at a super-fast rate. Alternatively, you could opt for a USB drive that can pack a large volume size inside the smallest housing.
Note for the Negatives
Before diving in and singing the good graces for the external HD, there has to be mention of a couple of negatives. For example, the data can be prone to readability issues if there are corrupt files or compatibility issues between windows laptops and MacBooks – a common problem being issues with not recognizing external hard drive mac. We could start looking at ways to combat these problems, but the guys over at SetApp can offer you hundreds of solutions through their handy blog. Check the linked page for more information.
Another issue that external HD users face is theft. The drives are often small and can easily be concealed, copied over to another drive, and returned or destroyed – it can be quite hard to keep track of your external drive.
One final issue to note on external hard drives is that you do have to physically have the drive with you, which means you can’t spontaneously get the family photos out. With cloud storage, you can access your media from any device as long as you have an internet connection.
Cost-Effectiveness
The majority of cloud services will offer you a certain amount of storage for free until charging you a monthly subscription – which can soon add up. With an external HD, you can pay around $100 for 6TB of data (which is pretty impressive). Although the upfront cost may be more costly, the overall cost will pay off.
Larger Capacity
Straight off the bat, with an external HD, you get access to much more memory than you can with cloud storage. Furthermore, if you have a very large number of photos to back up, it can get extremely tedious waiting for your crawling Wi-Fi to transfer data – an external HD cuts out the middle man and saves a lot of time.
Internet Free
With an external HD, all you have to do is plug it into your device and you have access to all of your media – as long as you have your chosen device, enough battery, and your hard drive, you’re good to go. Also, the process of transferring data backward and forwards is much faster to an external HD than cloud storage. When the rest of the world finds itself in a mass outage of the internet, you’ll be safe in the knowledge that your valued family photos will be accessible
Safe from Cybercriminals
Although your hard drive might be vulnerable to physical theft, that’s something you can easily control. When you choose to transfer your data to a cloud service, you are putting your important moments in the trust of a company – that can be prone to cyberattacks. This being said, cloud storage providers do an excellent job at encrypting your data but nothing is foolproof; however, with an external HD, you don’t need to worry about any of that.
Plug it into a Frame
As you are looking to store your family photos, why not back them up and display them for all to see? You can plug your external HD into a digital photo frame that will cycle through your treasured memories – hitting two birds with one stone.
Easy Transfer
Email and other messaging services are fantastic for sending over small amounts of data to people, the odd picture here and there. However, if you’re wanting to send an entire back catalog of embarrassing family photos, then it might be easier just to zap your files onto your external hard drive and physically give the photos over – you get to see your family and offload your shared times together.
Easy to Replace
Of course, no one likes things to break but it does happen from time to time. If your external HD malfunctions and needs replacing, it’s a pretty easy task. However, this does come with the issue of losing all of your backed-up data – which can be a nightmare if you cleared away the original files to make space. One idea to keep some peace of mind is to get yourself two hard drives and make dual backups. You could even keep one of them locked up in a safe for super security.
Further Uses
As well as saving your photos, you can save larger files like films onto your hard drive – allowing you to plug it into your TV and play. You can also gather the family around and watch your favorite embarrassing moments together. Further, backing your photos up onto your external hard drive and clearing them off your computer will allow your device to run faster – the less space there is clogging up the drive, the better it will run.
These are the main reasons for choosing an external hard drive for backing up your family photos. Technology can move forwards and cloud storage can grow to great heights, but sometimes you can’t beat the classic plug-and-play technology. Being able to transfer your memories easily and knowing that your moments are kept secure is priceless.