What is the best way to store photos on computer?
 

I have a question as to the best way to store my photos.

I have now accumulated many many including photos of my art work, and the altered photos I take and use as references for my art work.

We use flash drives to move things around from big computer to my dinosaur laptop that I use when doing my drawings etc.

We have a nice back up on the big desktop computer...which holds my photos easily.

I looked this up on Google and somewhere it said not to store on flash drives.

So are expansion drives the way to go? A one terra byte would be enough for me. I am thinking that if USB ports become obsolete, I would be stuck and not be able to retrieve the photos some day. Do the tablets now have USB ports?
Would TVs still have them? I am thinking someday I may be in a nursing home or the equiv and would like to view my photos. Not sure if my future would be inclusive of a computer.

We found a Seagate 1 TB expansion at Costco for about 50-60 dollars, and our son suggested NewEgg to look at too? This would require a computer to view, or a tablet with a USB port.

I looked on Amazon for a device to read hand held and not requiring a computer...a viewing device only. They were 200+ dollars.

I have so many copies of my art & pictures on flash & HD I need to purge some of the duplicates one of these days..

I did come across this for storage ideas.. most ideas I saw say do have double back ups on various storage media types.
Long Term Photo Storage Devices | ATP

This is not an easy solution, then...i see.

The final suggestion on your link is what I was thinking of too.

Back up the back up. I guess the expansion drive is the way to go. Hubby has one and we tested it out on this laptop. I moved one large file and it was pretty easy. We then deleted it.
It is a bit faster and easier than a back up with included software.

But it seems to me to be just a fancy flash drive? It doesn't have its own power source.

I read the reviews on Amazon for Seagate expansion drives.
Seems the 4TB has many failures.... about 15% were unhappy with it. The 1 TBs were more 5 star.

Kevin suggested Western Digital, so I'll check those tomorrow. I have 2 huge binders with slide and photo envelops (archival) with my old photos of my art work, from the 70's and 80's. I can barely lift them. I made them 2 winters ago. They are about 3 in thick! :thud:

But my photos from 2006 til now, are MANY and large pixels... and I use many of them for ideas for drawings. They are about 55 gig.

Kevin has warned me not to leave photos on my camera,or on flash drives for any length of time. He says they are not stable. I looked on Consumer Reports that we subscribe to and it said the same. "do not use flash drives for long term storage".

I'll let you know what transpires.

I use a combined approach for back-ups of my photos and everything else.

I have a couple of name-brand external HDs. For me Friday is back-up day; all important folders get copied to both of them (the "belt and braces" principle) - this usually takes less than an hour.

I also use CrashPlan (Online Data Backup | Offsite, Onsite & Cloud | Crashplan) as off-site back-up - there are other entities which offer similar services. I see this as insurance against disaster - my house burns down, etc.

For a fee CrashPlan backs up all of my important folders every day. This was useful when my old laptop died (a fatal HD crash) earlier this year so I was able to recover everything which (doh...) I had not backed up to my external HDs.