GROUP TEST: EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES

The best external hard drives offer bags of storage and ensure that your images stay safe and secure. We take a look at four options

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” That saying has never rung truer than when it comes to image storage. We invest so much money, time and effort in taking photos, but we often spare little thought on how and where our precious images are stored once we’re back home.

We’ve probably all been guilty of doing it. We come back from a shoot, excited to make a start on editing, and dump them on our desktop. And that’s where they’ll stay – vulnerable on the computer’s hard drive. However, as some of you may have learnt through bitter experience, hard drives can and do fail, and that’s when you not only lose everything else you’ve got resting on your computer, but also images that you’ll never be able to get back. The stakes are even higher if a laptop is your main machine, adding to the mix the risk of dropping it or having it lost or stolen.

That’s where a decent external hard drive comes in. These mains-powered devices might not offer the same flexibility as portable USB-powered hard drives, but they offer considerably more storage, while the latest devices offer a number of benefits over hard drives from even a couple of years ago. Faster and often more durable, the latest external hard drives should be an essential part of your photography workflow.

Our best-practice recommendation would be to make sure all your images are backed up on one drive, but for extra security and peace of mind, consider investing in a second drive that acts as a backup to that drive (and store it elsewhere if you can). Alternatively you could look at investing in cloud storage to make a backup of your images. Whatever you do, make sure you have a duplicate, so if one device fails, you’ve got another copy.