The Argument for Photographers to Use External Hard Drives
Before the digital era of film and photography, your perfect shot could get destroyed or damaged in many different ways. Someone could accidentally expose your roll of film to the light or improperly mix the chemicals in the dark room. Sometimes these mistakes were salvageable, sometimes not. Today, with digital photos and cloud backup, it seems as though either you have a photo or you don’t. There is rarely anything left to salvage. This makes keeping your photos more important than ever before. External hard drives add redundancy and keep your work and art safe.
Alternatives to External Hard Drives
Safety doesn’t need to come in the form of external hard drives, though at ProStorage, we believe external hard drives make the best option. With digital media becoming ubiquitous not just among professional photographers but among families as well, the file storage business continues to grow and produce more and more options for external storage.
Cloud Storage
As the hippest option for redundancy, cloud storage allows you to save your videos and photographs to a web-based server. Theoretically, you can access these files any time you have wifi, but this is not always the case. Cloud storage is a decent option considering it can potentially put an endless amount of memory at your fingertips at a monthly fee, but cloud storage is dependent on many factors. First, someone other than yourself has access to your files whether they choose to use that access or not. Second, if something happens internally with the company offering your cloud storage, you could lose all of your photographs and video data. Third, cloud storage will not always be readily available to you. Hotel wifi may not have the bandwidth to handle your uploads, or you might shoot film in a location without access to reliable internet of any kind.
Memory Cards
Though SD cards have made great strides in recent years, they still come short of external hard drives in terms of storage capacity. To be fair, SD cards aren’t exactly designed as backup devices. Cost per gigabyte for SD cards continues to decrease, but they lag behind external hard drives and will continue to for some time. Some SD cards border on becoming indestructible and they are lightweight and portable. This makes them decent for temporary storage, but they are easily lost and much more difficult to file in an organized way, especially when you must have so many to equal the storage of an external hard drive.
Organize Your External Hard Drives with ProStorage
At ProStorage, we consider external hard drives the intelligent choice for backing up photographs and video. For this reason, we developed external hard drive storage cases that keep your hard drives safe and well organized. Our hard drive foam makes data archiving simple. Check out ProStorage today!