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My Mom has over 400GB of photos on a quickly dying 2011 IMac. We are getting her a new computer but I am hoping to set up some system where she can safely store all these files in an easy to access format. Currently her photos are scattered throughout her computer in files and applications like the defunct iPhoto and the new Photos. She also has some 200GB of photos on an external disk.

My parents don't want to store the photos only on the machine as they are afraid of losing the machine and not having a backup. My idea was to hook them up with a google drive which would sync the computer in the background, how do other photographers solve this problem?

TL;DR

• I need a user friendly way to store and backup over 400GB of photos


• How should I move over 400GB of photos from an old dying computer to a new one?

Perhaps I'm a bit old-school in this way, but I personally avoid storing my stuff on "somebody else's computer" (a.k.a. the "cloud").

I would just buy (at least) two external drives of sufficient capacity - storage is cheap these days. Back up all your images onto one, and then make a copy of that drive on the other, so you have two copies. Generate a cryptographic hash of each file (MD5, SHA1 or something similar). Periodically test each drive by reading every file and comparing hashes, so that you know when you start to experience bit rot or the drive starts failing (bad sectors, etc.) and have time to acquire another drive which you can seed from the other still-working drive.

Depending on your platform, there's various software to assist with this (e.g. rsync or unison on Linux, both of which I'm pretty sure are available in some form for either Mac or Windows as well).

For best protection, keep one of these drives offsite - safe deposit box or have a friend or family member keep it for you. That will greatly reduce the risk of losing both drives at once.

The easiest and faster way to backup is an external drive. 400 Gb is not that much and 1 Tb hard drives are pretty cheap.

You could backup on two external hard drives and store one in a different place like a family member, in case (let's hope not) something happens like a burglar.

The other option is online storage, but 400 Gb is too much for a free account so you are probably forced to buy... like 50 years of storage. But remember to have a decently strong password.

Both methods have pros and cons.

With Amazon Prime you can store an unlimited amount of Photos incl. Raw Files!

https://www.amazon.de/b?ie=UTF8&node=12153288031

For storing amounts of data that large, especially in the realm of photography and video, RAID drives (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) are a reliable choice, albeit more expensive.

All RAID arrays consist of multiple drives that spread out your data across multiple disks, either to increase performance, provide data redundancy, or both. If you are just storing the files and are not constantly reading and writing the data to and from the disk, setting it up in RAID 1 is optimal data redundancy, meaning if one drive fails, you have a backup on the second drive. There are several other configurations, the other main popular one being RAID 0, which splits data into multiple parts over several disks to increase read and write speed.

If you’re looking for a cheaper solution, a simple external hard drive will work fine, but doesn’t protect your data if the drive fails.

With that much data, online storage likely isn’t optimal, especially if you’re needing to upload and download data constantly. It also doesn’t fit well into typical photography workflows through Lightroom and Photoshop (though I’m not sure what cloud storage options Adobe is offering these days, but with 400gb I bet it would be well more expensive and troublesome than getting a RAID).

Hope this helps.

The general reccomendation is a 3-2-1 Backup strategy, meaning you have 3 copies: 2 local, 1 offsite. Here's one way:

• Get a NAS appliance (like a Drobo) to protect against a disk crash
  
  
  
  
  • (or just an external disk, with no disk failure protection)
  
  
  
  


• Add an Apple Time Machine to get your 2nd local copy.


• Use some service like CrashPlan, BackBlaze, Amazon Prime, ... to do offsite backups.

The downside to these off-the-shelf solutions is they do not protect against bit rot on the disks. To get that, best I can tell, you'll need to do something custom like periodically running par2 or deploying a custom FreeNAS appliance with ZFS.