This is Part 2 of a three-part series on backing up your family photos. Part 1 laid out the 3-2-1 rule and why a phone, an iCloud account, or a single external drive isn't a backup. This post covers the local hard-drive half of that setup — the copy that lives in your house, plugged into your computer, with all your photos on it.
The cloud half comes in Part 3. For now, the goal is to get a real, organized, durable copy of every photo you care about onto a drive that you own.
What kind of drive to buy
For most people, a plain external USB hard drive is the right answer. You want something with at least two or three times the storage of your current photo library, because you're going to keep adding to it for years and you don't want to be shopping for a bigger drive every other Christmas.
A few things to look for. Get a drive from a brand you've heard of: Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, Crucial. Skip the no-name $40 specials on Amazon. SSDs are faster and more rugged than spinning drives, but for photo backup the speed doesn't matter much and the price-per-gigabyte on spinning drives is still a lot better. Spinning drives work well for backups; SSDs make more sense for things you actively work on.
If you shoot a lot of video — phone 4K clips add up fast, and camcorder footage even faster — a NAS (network-attached storage) is worth a look. A two-bay NAS from Synology or QNAP holds two drives that mirror each other, so if one drive dies the other still has everything. It sits on your network instead of plugging into one computer, which is handy if more than one person in the house is adding photos. It's more money and more setup, but for a household with a real video library it's the better tool.
How to organize the folders
With your hard drive ready to go, you need to consider organizing your backups so you can find things in the future. The goal is a folder structure that still makes sense to you ten years from now, and to whoever inherits this drive someday.
Ordering your backup folders by type of file (e.g. Photos or Videos), the year, and the month is usually specific enough to find them later:
Photos/2024/2024-01-January/Photos/2024/2024-02-February/Photos/2025/2025-06-June/
Inside each month folder, the photo files keep whatever names the camera or phone gave them. Putting the year inside the folder name as well as the parent folder means the names are self-describing when you're scrolling or searching, so you don't have to remember which parent folder you were in.
For big events, add a subfolder inside the month — 2025-08-August/Sarah-Wedding/ — keeping everyday photos sorted by date rather than by event. Date-based folders are the only system that tends to stick.
How often to copy new photos over
Once a month is a good minimum. Pick a date — first of the month, last Sunday, whatever — and set a recurring calendar reminder. Plug the drive in, copy the new month's photos off your phone and computer into the right folder, eject the drive, put it back in the closet.
If you take a lot of photos around big events — a wedding, a vacation, a new baby — copy those over right when you get home. Don't wait for the monthly cycle. The photos you'd be most heartbroken to lose are the ones worth backing up the same day.
Rotate drives so one failure doesn't wipe you out
A single external drive is a single point of failure, and external drives do eventually die. Owning two drives and rotating between them means a dead drive doesn't take everything with it.
Buy two identical drives. Label them Drive A and Drive B with a piece of tape and a Sharpie. Use Drive A for a few months, then switch to Drive B and copy everything from A onto B so they match. Keep going, swapping every few months. If one drive dies, the other one has everything up to the last sync.
The other reason to do this: when a drive starts to fail, it often fails during a copy operation, which is exactly when you find out. If that's your only drive, you find out the worst possible way. With two drives, a failure during a copy is annoying instead of catastrophic.
That covers the local side. Part 3 gets into the offsite copy — the one that survives a house fire, a flood, or a stolen laptop.
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