Backing up photos (Microsoft OneDrive)

[nelford_safc]

Alreet. I'm a bit confused with myself at the minute. After having lost about 300gb worth of data after a secondary HD crash I've become a bit paranoid. My setup at the minute is like this:

250gb SSD - windows 7, programs and games installed on this
1TB secondary HD - Photos, movies, music and documents stored on this

Right, so, I signed up OneDrive. This OneDrive asked me install a folder onto my C: drive. With it being a 250gb drive I didn't have the room for all my photos and videos. Instead I installed the OneDrive on my secondary drive. Once I copied my photos and documents into the OneDrive folder they started to appear in my OneDrive online backup.

This is where I get confused. Only the files stored on my OneDrive folder on my secondary HD are uploaded to my online backup. If my secondary HD went tits up again then my OneDrive would also be lost and the online cloud part would then have nothing to read. So it isn't really backing them up at all.

Anyway I was just wondering how people here backed up their photos online?

 

[jaxaxe]

I would get an external USB drive (or possibly two. Two is safer than one).

USB3 drives are coming down in price, and if your PC has USB3 ports they are a lot quicker than the old USB2 drives.

I've seen 1TB drives as cheap as £40 recently, and 4TB drives around the £120 mark

 

[Roger]

This is where I get confused. Only the files stored on my OneDrive folder on my secondary HD are uploaded to my online backup. If my secondary HD went tits up again then my OneDrive would also be lost and the online cloud part would then have nothing to read. So it isn't really backing them up at all.

I don't use OneDrive, but typically what these backup services do is synchronise what is on your hard drive with what is in the cloud - so if you add a file to the folder, it gets automatically replicated in the cloud. If you delete a file from the folder it will (usually optionally) be deleted from the cloud. Similarly if you add a file directly to the cloud it would get copied to your hard drive next time your PC is running.

If your drive fails completely, you haven't "deleted" your files, so they wouldn't be deleted from the cloud. When you add a new drive, it will synchronise again, copying the files from the cloud back to your new drive.

As with all replication, if you corrupt something on your hard drive, the corruption will get copied to the cloud!


What I do is use Amazon Glacier for my external backup and schedule a backup once a week.