first, i would like to say, there will be difference of this issue which depending on where you live.
quiality of IT service and the price will be difference on each countries so i hope you understand what i am going to write is not the right answer for you. this is what i’m thinking as just a regular guy who loves photo shooting. lol
you know, when you go somewhere and spend a day with photoshooting, you might need to spend 100GB or so on your SD card or extenal HDD (or maybe SSD). and you delete some of it because you didn’t like them or whatever reason you had, though still you might lose 50GB or so for your favorite photos.
so, soon or later, your hdd or ssd on your computer will be full. and it’s sooner than other people who don’t use such big files.
before i got camera, originally i had 1TB HDD +256GB SDD for my computer but i needed to buy 6TB external HDD for my photos.
from my experience and as an IT manager job, it’s not good idea to have just one external hdd. because it’s easily to be broken. lol
even quiality of the product, hdd, much better than before but still any kind of device will be broken some how, someday.
and “someday” means, it could be this year or it could be next year.
when the device breaks, you might see some symptoms or it happens suddenly, you will never know!
so i always buy one extra, means, buy two extrenal HDD and sychronized them all time by the small program i made.
what if two external HDD crushed in the same time?
yeah it could happen but you can’t doubt everything.
here is what i’m doing for saving data.
buy 2 extrenal hdd and these has to be same size.
and next year, i buy one to replace then next year, buy another to replace another one.
the life time of external hdd is 3 years. but i relace it in 2 years for safety.
so, only first year is the costs double but after that, only one external hdd i buy, so it costs between $80 and $100.
compare to cloud service like box, one drive or google drive, per a year getween $70 and 100$. (in japanese Yen, cloud servie is little more expensive than physical hdd)
so physical external hdd vs cloud storage service, my answer is physical external hdd is better for now.
if the cloud service is way cheaper than to buy physical external hdd, i will think about it.
why i choose physical external hdd?
here is the reason;
i was using cloud storage before. i just keep uploading my photo to save as archive but their service has changed, i could keep it in clouds but i wanted to change some so i needed to download all data once.
to download all data, you need to have same size or maybe half of total size of usage on clouds to synchronize data to download.
i’m using fiber connection but still it took long to download, spent like 4 or 5 days.
then i found some data has missing or broken. luckily i had copy of them on clouds so it was not that big trouble.
besides, when i got a new external hdd, i need to sychronize 5 or 6TB data with old hdd, it took just one night. just keep turning on my pc to run the bat file or any other data copy software, that’s it.
yes, basically it’s connection speed issue but it’s hard to change to fast connection at rent apartment room here in japan.
it costs a lot to replace the terminal device in the apartment to split the connection to each room. so most house owner don’t want to do it.
also there are 2 reasons i avoid cloud services;
- their service changes often. every changes are not that you’ll be happy with. right? if their change won’t make you happy, you might need to download all data as i did. it’s pain in the ass.
- some service has no limitation for data uploads but they want to analize your data. is it happy to you? if it’s ok, maybe you will love it but as i said above, if they changed their service, you might need to download all data.
the thing is cloud service is not stable as service. as much as they develop their systems, they need to upgrade or update their service and policy. so, we have to adjust ourselves to their updated system. and sometimes we experience that we can’t take it back.
what i want is stabilized situation and environment. updated thing is nice but i don’t want to keep track what is newest. so, for now, i choose to use physical external hdd. it’s little classic but for now it’s best choice to me.