Let's talk external hard drives please

I use a WD Passport with 2 TB on my Mac and a similar one for my desktop PC, and no password is needed. I just plug it into my device and copy my photos over. I have nearly 20 years of digital photos, so I wanted to have lots of space for growth.

I would look into both. I use google photos to back up every photo on my phone, my apple products do the photostream thing so that's another layer of redundancy, and then I have 2 EHDs that I use with Time Machine on my Mac but I also copy all my photos onto those each month. It's just the same process that the people above me mentioned, no password, just copying files over to have them in another place. Both are WD brand, but different models - Passport and Element I think. Drives eventually fail so the more places you have things the less likely you are to lose everything. But they can't help you unless you are backing up regularly.

Solid state drives are more stable than spinning hard drives, I gather. If you get a 2TB solid state drive (or better yet, two) and copy all of your precious things onto those on a regular basis (weekly or monthly or at least quarterly, depending on how many photos you take and how many other places are backing them up) you'd have a little more insurance against loss.

I know some people here use Backblaze or another offsite backup service. I haven't gotten around to getting that set up yet.

I'm curious if the WD password you have is a setting that can be changed. But I'd also suggest you look into using a password manager like LastPass for everything in your life. The passwords it generates/saves are far more secure than anything you can make up and you don't have to remember them.

But in the meantime, yes, I would suggest you at least set up OneDrive so you have a cloud based backup. $24 a year is pretty cheap. Then you can figure out an EHD that works for you in addition to that.

I’ve had the one for my PC about three years. I got the one for my Mac last summer when I was doing Miss Freddy’s Backup Bootcamp. Apparently the average life span of an EHD is about five years. I also have all of my photos organized in folders by year in OneDrive. My EHDs are copies of those folders. It was worthwhile for me to pay the premium for OneDrive since the annual fee allows me to have Word, Excel, PowerPoint and One Note. If you are already paying for Amazon Prime, you can back up your photos there instead. I feel good about having a cloud-based system plus two physical drives. My photos automatically go from my phone to OneDrive, so I can delete them from iCloud if I wish to save space. I still haven’t taken that step yet…next on my list.

I can't speak to that specific EHD, but computer hard drives do wear out/go bad and should be replaced. (With a quick google, it seems the experts say anywhere from 3-5 years on the conservative side and 5-7 years on the liberal side.) I think of it like auto/house insurance: no one likes to pay their insurance bill, and there's a good chance you may never need it that badly, but if something catastrophic DOES happen, man are you glad you have it. With that in mind, I'd say to think of the loss/grief you'd have if you lost everything and act accordingly. I don't mean go hungry or devote 50% of your monthly living budget to backup equipment/software, but don't skimp either, because on the off chance you need it, you're gonna want to make sure it's good.

This has been referenced on other threads about backup, but think of the 3-2-1 rule of backup. 

3: Create one primary backup and two copies of your data.

2: Save your backups to two different types of media.

1: Keep at least one backup file offsite.

The point of the 3-2-1 backup rule is to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. If you have multiple versions/types/locations, you have a greater chance of being able to recover your data when something happens.

In regards to your question about OneDrive, I don't think there is any unlimited (high-res) storage that is free, but I could be wrong. Data storage costs money, so companies don't want to give that away for free. While your results may vary (depending on the quality/size of your photos), I just took a look at some of my photo storage and in one main folder, I have 139GB of files, which is 11,673 photos. Looking at my individual photos, they range from about 1KB-1.7KB, so for me, 100GB would be about around 9K photos.

Amazon Prime has photo storage for free, no matter the size or file type. I use it for all of my RAW files from my DSLR, as well as photos from my phone.

As a former network administrator/tech support person: please please PLEASE don't rely on just an external hard drive for your photo backups. External hard drives fail, even if you have one that's been fine for 5+ years, they will fail and it can be very expensive to recover data from a dead hard drive (if they can even recover anything). Find a cloud storage solution that works for your system. There are tons out there, Google photos, Amazon photos, Shutterfly, Flickr, etc. I have 2 external hard drives and 3 cloud drives I backup to. Is that overkill? Yeah, probably, but I've had online storage sites close down and I've had to download all my data from those sites and find alternate solutions.