Storage advice..

[Jeff Le Taxi]

Need somewhere to store precious family photos and video, do i need a ssd? or can i get away with a conventional portable hard drive? am i right in thinking there are fireproof drives out there?

[AussieDog]

Nope. Nothing is forever. Have backups and make sure you have actually managed a successful restore. Do a fresh backup on a regular basis. Probably storing it in the cloud is safest with regards to not losing it...but security is another matter.

[Tractor_Saint]

If you backup to SSD then you'd need to ensure you offsite it. A friend of mine backed up their machine every weekend and was a stickler for doing it. All until they had their house broken into and the laptop and SSD were stolen as they sat next to each other.

 

I use a professional Flickr account for all my important photos. I backup my laptop on a weekly basis (using a free program called 'SyncBack') onto shared drive on my home network.

[pedg]

Get yourself a network storage device (NAS, network attached storage) with at least 2 drives and set the drives up so that they mirror each other so if one fails the other is safe. If you want to keep an offsite backup one of the cheapest ways to do this for large amounts of data is to get a USB docking station for SATA hard drives. Then get a cheap hard drive large enough to hold your data and every so often bring it home and backup the contents of your NAS to the drive.

[Whitey Grandad]

All hard drives end in failure. Backup, backup, backup. I know a businessman who had his house burgled and yes, laptop and backup both taken.

[toofarnorth]

I'd say a hosted option would be the least hassle. I've just bought extra storage on my google account and chuck everything up there although i've noticed the costs for new subscriptions has gone up quite a bit recently.

[JPTCount]

for small amounts of data use dropbox, google drive or icloud.

 

I use drive and it makes rebuilding a dream. sync, rebuild, sync.

 

for larger amounts id jus use an external drive, nas or raid is a bit ott if it's just home backup and ur not having to access it on a regular basis.

[Sidney Fudpucker the 3rd]

NAS drives are great unless the power supply fails and takes both drives with it. I've seen it happen on several occasions. I run a NAS and then I do a manual back up to an external HDD which I don't keep in the house for the simple reason that if I was burgled or if there was a fire I'd lose everything.