Ask Edwin: The Best Way to Store Our Photos?

Hello Edwin, we had been storing all our pictures on an external hard drive which suddenly failed. I need to find a better storage solution for our photos. I am hoping you have some suggestions!

Hello!There are definitely a few paths you can take here.First, external hard drives are a great way to store photos. I would suggest getting a new external hard drive and back that drive up to a cloud service like Carbonite or CrashPlan. Both have a small fee but it’s worth it in the long run. Apple iCloud is a comparable backup service but is more expensive and can get confusing pretty quick.The benefit of having an external and a backup of the files in the cloud is that if the external fails in the future you can get a new one and restore all your files easily from the cloud. It’s also helpful to have a copy on your hard drive for quick access.One of the most efficient ways to upload photos from your phone is to use a photo manager/cloud storage service like Google Photos or Yahoo’s Flickr. Both sites give you free unlimited storage and you can organize your photos into albums for easy viewing later. They also integrate third-party photo book services so that you can arrange photos in a book to print and have sent to you. Books don't crash!Using Flickr or Google Photos is also nice when your phone storage is getting full. You can use their app to auto-upload all of your photos. They can then be deleted to free up more storage on your phone. Google Photos makes this as easy with only needing to click one button.The downside to a cloud-based service is that at some point they might go out of business or change their business model which could make it a hassle to retrieve your photos.It might be best to do all three! Have local copies of some of your favorite photos backed up on Carbonite, and upload all of your photos as you take them to a Google Photos/Flickr account. You can never be too careful.Thanks for the question!Edwin-Links in this article to Carbonite are referral links. If you end up purchasing a plan through Carbonite, Edwin earns a commission.