
CrashPlan, Carbonite, and Mozy are all designed for creating a backup copy of your files on remote servers. Online backup services are another option. RELATED: How to Automatically Upload Photos From Your Digital Camera

You could then back up the computer’s files to an external drive with normal backup software and you’d have copies in multiple places. This works well if you have a computer with a large internal drive - if you have a desktop PC, you might want to buy and install a new hard drive. You could also store the photos on your computer and back them up to an external drive. There’s just no way around this in the Windows software ecosystem. Unfortunately, even this open-source tool tries to install junkware, so watch out when you install it. Microsoft’s old SyncToy application does this well, but the open-source FreeFileSync application is more robust. You can do this manually by dragging and dropping files, but you’ll probably want to use an application that will “sync” the contents of one drive to an external drive. Get a second external drive and regularly make a copy of the data from the first external drive to the second one. Dump your photos on the main external drive as normal. But, at a minimum, you should be regularly backing up that external drive to another external drive. If want to store your photos and other data on an external drive, that’s fine. And it’s not a guaranteed result - it’s possible that a drive failure could render your data completely inaccessible, or that you’d only be able to recover some data from it. This could easily cost you upwards of a thousand dollars, depending on the service you go with. You might need to pay for professional data recovery services that will crack the drive open and attempt to get back your files. For example, part of the drive may have failed, but the actual data may still be stored safely. If you’re lucky, it may be possible to fix it.

Let’s say that external drive with all your photos and other important data fails. RELATED: How to Recover a Deleted File: The Ultimate Guide Data Recovery Services Are Expensive, and Don’t Always Work But drives can always fail, and it’s crucial to have another copy.


And, if you’ve never had a drive fail, it can seem to work fine. It can be tempting to dump your photos - and any other type of large data - on the external drive and just store it there if your computer doesn’t have much drive space.
