This has probably been asked thousands of times; thanks for your patience and help in advance.
We have an Acer laptop that is 4 years old...a Sony camcorder with a microSD card...two Samsung Galaxy S3s...and children so we have tons of photos on the Laptop, microSD card and cell phones.
I need to consolidate and back up our precious family photos and videos.
My first thought was to buy an external USB drive, however, it sounds like those crash quite a bit and also that the physical USB connection can become damaged.
My second thought was to burn DVDs, however, this could take a while and seems like a hassle...but it would be a tertiary (?) back up of the back up.
My third thought was to get a NAS external drive...but I don't know much about these: is this something that I could connect to our Windstream DSL modem/router and use wireless to send photos from our cell phones and laptop to? If so, that would seem to avoid the damaged USB port risk, as well as have the benefit of us actually using the drive because it would be easier to click and drag versus pulling the drive out of a fire safe or closet and plugging it in.
My current idea is to buy a 1TB or so NAS external drive...and put everything onto that now, and also burn DVDs of everything...then, on an ongoing basis, use the NAS drive to push things off of our cell phones/laptop and maybe burn DVD copies of the NAS drive every six months or so (realistically once between now and 2020...I haven't changed our smoke alarm batteries for over a year...between home and car maintenance, it feels a little burdensome to back up everything on a rigid schedule...).
With kids, and life being very busy, I think I need something that 1) is somewhat affordable (I could stand to spend around $300 or so on this), 2) fairly quick once things are up and running, and 3) pretty secure.
I have heard of cloud storage...is that a good option? Our DSL is around 3 megabits download speed, .5 megabits upload speed (roughly), so for maybe 100 gigs+ is that realistic? Then you have subscription costs?
Could anyone recommend a good NAS external drive (assuming this is a valid way to go)?
Would blank DVDs from Office Max or Walmart be as good as others?
I had read that .png is a good format for photos...since it may not fall by the wayside in 20 years...is that important?
Any other advice?
Thank you.
We have an Acer laptop that is 4 years old...a Sony camcorder with a microSD card...two Samsung Galaxy S3s...and children so we have tons of photos on the Laptop, microSD card and cell phones.
I need to consolidate and back up our precious family photos and videos.
My first thought was to buy an external USB drive, however, it sounds like those crash quite a bit and also that the physical USB connection can become damaged.
My second thought was to burn DVDs, however, this could take a while and seems like a hassle...but it would be a tertiary (?) back up of the back up.
My third thought was to get a NAS external drive...but I don't know much about these: is this something that I could connect to our Windstream DSL modem/router and use wireless to send photos from our cell phones and laptop to? If so, that would seem to avoid the damaged USB port risk, as well as have the benefit of us actually using the drive because it would be easier to click and drag versus pulling the drive out of a fire safe or closet and plugging it in.
My current idea is to buy a 1TB or so NAS external drive...and put everything onto that now, and also burn DVDs of everything...then, on an ongoing basis, use the NAS drive to push things off of our cell phones/laptop and maybe burn DVD copies of the NAS drive every six months or so (realistically once between now and 2020...I haven't changed our smoke alarm batteries for over a year...between home and car maintenance, it feels a little burdensome to back up everything on a rigid schedule...).
With kids, and life being very busy, I think I need something that 1) is somewhat affordable (I could stand to spend around $300 or so on this), 2) fairly quick once things are up and running, and 3) pretty secure.
I have heard of cloud storage...is that a good option? Our DSL is around 3 megabits download speed, .5 megabits upload speed (roughly), so for maybe 100 gigs+ is that realistic? Then you have subscription costs?
Could anyone recommend a good NAS external drive (assuming this is a valid way to go)?
Would blank DVDs from Office Max or Walmart be as good as others?
I had read that .png is a good format for photos...since it may not fall by the wayside in 20 years...is that important?
Any other advice?
Thank you.
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