One of the last items on the “Stock Your Treasure Chest” checklist is ‘Portable Hard Drive: Backup of home computers including family photos, videos, and PDFs of important documents”.
It’s the photos and videos you should really be thinking about.
Business philosopher Jim Rohn once said: “There are three things to leave behind: your photographs, your library, and your personal journals. These things are certainly going to be more valuable to future generations than your furniture!”.
You may not be able to stuff your library and all your personal journals in your safe box, but you can certainly keep your photographs (electronic, of course).
The photos and videos of you and your family from across the years are some of your most precious treasures.
You want them to be protected for the long term. And that’s why you need a portable hard drive to put them on.
Unlike the USB drive I talked about yesterday, a portable hard drive is designed to hold data from multiple computers, tablets, and smart phones.
I’ll tell you what we use in a minute, but let me first tell you how we have it set up.
Each electronic device has its own folder. This way it’s easier to back things up on a schedule.
A schedule?
Yep, ours is quarterly. Every 3 months, we do a backup of each device. Being the anal retentive person I am, I do it at the change of each season. First day of spring, summer, fall, and winter.
Next question you may have is “How much storage do I need?”.
I recommend 5 terabytes of storage. That’s 5000 gigabytes.
Your typical laptop has 500 gigabytes of storage; a smart phone has around 128 gigabytes.
Go with more if you need to, but 5TB of storage should take you a long way.
Another thing…grab the right portable hard drive for your needs.
If all your devices are from Apple, get the Mac version.
If all your devices are non-Apple or you have a mixture of non-Apple and Apple, get the PC version.
(Mac doesn’t play nice in the sandbox with Microsoft and Android.)
So what portable hard drive should you get?
I recommend one from WD (Western Digital). Either model you get allows you to put a password on it. And it really is plug-and-play.
Anyway, here are links to the two models…
WD 5TB My Passport Ultra (PC version)
WD 5TB My Passport Ultra (Mac version)
Grab the one that fits your family, and schedule a couple hours to back up every electronic device you have.
Then put it in your fireproof safe and know your family’s photos and videos are safe and secure.
Be Safe, Have Fun,
Darren Bayne
