However if you place any value on your photos, you\u2019ll know your teeth are important for smiling, while the storage of those photos is also important, too.<\/p>\n
World Photography Day rarely has a theme<\/a>, but if we could cite one that\u2019s important, it\u2019s that storing your photos is just as important as taking them. Without the proper storage, your photos will cease to be, files of ones and zeroes disappearing into the ether never to be found or returned again.<\/p>\n Why you need to back up<\/p>\n It stands to reason that if you\u2019re taking photos, or if you\u2019re recording videos, they\u2019re worth something to you. Unfortunately, devices can die, drives can fail, and your images can disappear just like that.<\/p>\n Before this journalist was writing about technology, he was actually a photographer, photojournalist, and photo operator working on fashion sets and out in the field. From personal experience, the number of times a memory card or a backup drive would fail is too large to remember, and it can simply happen through no fault of your own.<\/p>\n Sometimes technology fails. Sometimes technology dies. If your images are on that piece of technology, your files die with it.<\/p>\n They could be photos of the family, images of lighting you captured<\/a> for the first time, or even special memories taken in 360 degree video for VR<\/a> and the Vision Pro. They could literally be anything.<\/p>\n It\u2019s why backing up is so important, particularly if these images and videos and memories are worth something, anything, to you.<\/p>\n Big backups at home<\/p>\n At home (or in a business), one of the more obvious backup recommendations to be made is in the form of a NAS drive, or a \u201cNetwork Attached Storage\u201d solution. Think of this as a hard drive attached to your network that you can simply save files to.<\/p>\n The idea is fairly simple \u2014 a drive attached to your network \u2014 but many NAS drives go a step further with the addition of a second hard drive.<\/p>\n Much like how two heads are better than one, two drivers are also better because you can choose to:<\/p>\n Increase the size of your storage, or<\/p>\n Mirror the drive and have a backup of your backup.<\/p>\n Either option means a better backup, either with more space or a form of redundancy, though they need a different form of hard drive to work.<\/p>\n These days, most NAS drives are bought without the hard drive, and come from brands such as Synology and QNAP, with you needing to bring your own hard drives. Some options come pre-made, such as the Synology BeeStation, set with 4TB of storage, but if you need more, you need a larger NAS with support for your own drives.<\/p>\n The best hard drives for this type of backup are actually made for a NAS, which basically means they\u2019re hardened for regular write and rewrite cycles always happening in a 24\/7 way. Think of these drives as being different because they\u2019re always being accessed, rather than only sometimes on a computer, which may have idle time.<\/p>\n Drives made for this include WD\u2019s Red and Red Pro, and Seagate\u2019s Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro, and typically cover sizes ranging from 2TB all the way up to a staggering 26TB of space.<\/p>\n If you opt for more than one, a NAS can either boost the storage by doubling it, or make a mirrored copy in case one fails.<\/p>\n Pick the latter, and you\u2019ve found a way to automatically make a backup and save your files if a hard drive fails, which can always happen.<\/p>\n Solid storage to go<\/p>\n Out in the field, you won\u2019t have a network hard drive to rely on. NAS is for home and in the office, but there are other options available, and they\u2019re typically faster, too.<\/p>\n On the go, you may want to turn to external hard drives, or the faster option: external solid state drives, also known as \u201cSSD\u201d. More like the memory inside your phone or laptop, solid state drives lack the moving parts of their hard disk siblings and are speedy like memory, making them faster than hard drives.<\/p>\n Speed isn\u2019t the only win these drives offer, either. They can also be clad in durable casing and padding, making them more resistant to drops and the elements, handy if you\u2019re worried your backups mightn\u2019t survive a day trip or something else.<\/p>\n It\u2019s no wonder that solid state storage is typically built for photographers and videographers to go, because their files are often big and need faster transfers, making them suitable for the speed of a solid state drive.<\/p>\n The faster the drive, the better it\u2019s likely to be, though keep in mind, the more storage you have, the higher the price tag.<\/p>\n Portable solid state drives also lack the mirroring thing, so you won\u2019t be able to automatically have some form of automatic redundancy for your backups. However, you will likely gain some water resistance and durability along with the speed, such as the IP65 water resistance in Samsung\u2019s T7 SSD<\/a> and in SanDisk\u2019s Extreme Pro Portable SSD<\/a>.<\/p>\n Back up to the cloud<\/p>\n One option that\u2019s always worth considering is the cloud, and it\u2019s something you can do from your phone and from your desk.<\/p>\n From your phone, backing up your photos to services such as Apple\u2019s iCloud (or Photos in general), Google\u2019s Drive (or Google Photos), Dropbox, Microsoft\u2019s OneDrive, or any other will affect your phone plan\u2019s downloads even though you\u2019re uploading.<\/p>\n For most phone plans, the cost of downloading and uploading is combined, so if you have a lot of files, be mindful that you\u2019re not only paying for the storage on a platform, but also the uploads to get them there.<\/p>\n With that in mind, you might want to wait until you\u2019re home, where your home\u2019s internet plan will likely have a little more to work with, and can upload in the background.<\/p>\n Each of these services comes with a free storage amount, but once you exceed that, you\u2019ll need to pay for more storage to keep uploading, and to keep your photos backed up in the cloud.<\/p>\n How to make backing up a routine<\/p>\n Like any form of unpracticed hygiene, backing up can feel like a chore until you get in the swing of things and just keep doing it.<\/p>\n To start, pick your device or service, and just back up a few things. Start with a little before building it up to become a regular thing. You can do it once a week or two, but put it into your schedule so you don\u2019t forget.<\/p>\n World Photography Day falls on a Tuesday this year, so consider putting 10 or 15 minutes aside every Tuesday or every second Tuesday to back some photos up that can\u2019t be automatically backed up.<\/p>\n Most phones can automatically back up a photo library provided there\u2019s enough storage, but other cameras won\u2019t be so lucky. Grab the microSD or SD card from that camera, and back those files up to another drive or some cloud storage.<\/p>\n And if you don\u2019t have any new pictures to back up, just snap a few more shots. It\u2019s certainly the week for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The last thing anyone remembers to do is backup, so this year for World Photography Day, consider snapping…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78371,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,63,59868,59869,59870,59871,105],"class_list":["post-78370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-backup","tag-external-storage","tag-hard-drives","tag-ssd","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78370\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/sandisk-pro-g-drive-2025-01-jpg.webp.webp\"\/)
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/stock-hard-drive-storage-hdd-01.jpg\"\/)
Hard drives may lack the speed of their solid state cousins, but their capacity is typically much larger.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/samsung-ssd-2023-t9-03.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n![\"SanDisk](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/FAF004B6-4322-4183-B74A-802E6EBAC5DF.jpeg\"\/)
<\/p>\n