Recommendations for an external hard drive?

[Urban Cowboy]

They make 1Tb USB drives nowadays for $20.

https://www.amazon.ca/Keychain-Smartpho ... hdGY&psc=1

That's also Chinese, which falls under the buyer beware category, in that price range.

Learned my lesson the hard way.

[BC Landlord]

That's also Chinese, which falls under the buyer beware category, in that price range.

Hardly anything is not Chinese-made nowadays.

[Jlabute]

That's also Chinese, which falls under the buyer beware category, in that price range.

Hardly anything is not Chinese-made nowadays.

That's for sure. Although necessary electronic components are shipped to China. Various sensors, regulators, microcontrollers and more, come from foundries in the US, Singapore, Taiwan, Germany, Japan, etc. I've seen counterfeit parts.

[NotNorthAnymore]

I got a 5 bay Synology (DS1520) a couple of years ago and put in 3 drives.
That gives me space to add if needed.
Have a total of 17TB of space available and currently using around 14TB.
My NEF files take up the largest area without a doubt. (Shooting D850 - 14 bit)
(LR shows around 45,000 files at this point)

WD Wolf drives (at this point I can't find the names, but I didn't cut costs on them).
Have a couple of 6TB WD portable drives that I back up to weekly.
Compressed the data just fits.
Looked at online backups, but for that amount of data way too expensive.

Data will expand to fill all available storage solutions in a shorter period of time than you would ever imagine.!

ETA - AND I still have not had time to sit down and go thru all my negatives and pictures from the 1st 35 years of having a film camera. Suspect I will be adding to the NAS at some point soon.

I’m not sure how exciting 20,000 .NEF files are to anyone else, but tertiary backups are what I aim to do (eventually).

So lots of Nikon RAW image files and video files? A NAS is a good idea. Not sure how much you want to spend, but maybe you'd want at least 2 x 2TB (smaller or larger)disks in a RAID1 array. That would mean if one disk were to die, you could replace it. One disk is a perfect copy of the other. Brands like Synology or QNAS are good.

[Jlabute]

I got a 5 bay Synology (DS1520) a couple of years ago and put in 3 drives.
That gives me space to add if needed.
Have a total of 17TB of space available and currently using around 14TB.
My NEF files take up the largest area without a doubt. (Shooting D850 - 14 bit)
(LR shows around 45,000 files at this point)

WD Wolf drives (at this point I can't find the names, but I didn't cut costs on them).
Have a couple of 6TB WD portable drives that I back up to weekly.
Compressed the data just fits.
Looked at online backups, but for that amount of data way too expensive.

Data will expand to fill all available storage solutions in a shorter period of time than you would ever imagine.!

ETA - AND I still have not had time to sit down and go thru all my negatives and pictures from the 1st 35 years of having a film camera. Suspect I will be adding to the NAS at some point soon.

So lots of Nikon RAW image files and video files? A NAS is a good idea. Not sure how much you want to spend, but maybe you'd want at least 2 x 2TB (smaller or larger)disks in a RAID1 array. That would mean if one disk were to die, you could replace it. One disk is a perfect copy of the other. Brands like Synology or QNAS are good.

Are you using any form of RAID? It doesn't sound like it. Do you ever worry about your Synology disks failing?

I wonder how digital information should be passed down from generation to generation. I suspect most is lost forever. Every ancestor today can have TB of images. Imagine being the care-taker of an infinitely expanding digital legacy.

[kgcayenne]

I’m trying to get motivated to follow the advice I receive over and over and over: PRINT YOUR WORK

[NotNorthAnymore]

Are you using any form of RAID? It doesn't sound like it. Do you ever worry about your Synology disks failing?

I wonder how digital information should be passed down from generation to generation. I suspect most is lost forever. Every ancestor today can have TB of images. Imagine being the care-taker of an infinitely expanding digital legacy.

Synology uses BTRFS which is a better form of RAID and allows you to mix and match drives and get full use of them.
They also have Hyper Backup and Active Backup for Business.
Along with a 'Bare metal backup/ restore' function.
ABB is also available to use without Synology.

All round I am glad I went with them. I used a QNAP before and it was (IMO) clunky and hard to use.
This is much simpler.