

- #How to get pictures from icloud to external hard drive portable#
- #How to get pictures from icloud to external hard drive software#
- #How to get pictures from icloud to external hard drive Pc#
- #How to get pictures from icloud to external hard drive zip#

Unfortunately, a CD only stores 702MB of data, which is great for 100K texts but not so good for 5MB image files. Because they are portable, you can easily store copies off-site. Photos on write-once optical discs cannot be deleted by accident, cannot be encrypted or infected by malware, and are unlikely to be stolen. With optical drives, you should use high-quality discs and store them in a cool, dark and dry place. The current options include CD-R, DVD and Blu-ray optical discs. Optical discsīecause of the risks to hard drives, it’s a good idea to keep backups on removable storage media as well. You should therefore keep a backup “off site” in the office, or at a friend or relative’s house, or perhaps sealed in a moisture-proof box in a garage or shed. If a burglar steals your PC, they may take the backup drive as well, and if your house burns down, you’ll also lose both.
#How to get pictures from icloud to external hard drive Pc#
If your PC is infected by malware such as ransomware, it will usually encrypt files on external hard drives as well. If your external hard drive is always plugged into your PC, then you can delete whole folders by accident, or by making errors when copying files.


Second, your data is at risk of being stolen or destroyed by fire, flood or some other disaster. First, your data is vulnerable both to human error and to malicious software. However, backup drives have their limitations. Hard drives are good for storing photos because they are cheap, they provide fast access to data, and it’s very easy to copy a whole hard drive to another hard drive – especially if you have USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt connections. Two hard drives is a usable minimum, but I have my photos on at least three: my desktop PC, the external USB hard drive that backs up my PC, and an 8TB drive that backs up three external hard drives. If you want to keep photos for 50 years, you might have to store them on roughly 10 hard drives in all.īecause a hard drive can fail at any time, it’s not enough to store your photos on a single drive. However, it’s a good rule of thumb that a drive is increasingly likely to fail after five years or 50,000 hours of use. Some drives fail after a few months while others work for a decade or more. Recently, I had a 1TB PC hard drive fail after four years, and a 2TB external USB hard drive failed after seven years. The one thing we know about hard drives is that most of them fail sooner rather than later. In simpler times we had photos developed and printed on a regular basis - but they were still vulnerable to irreparable damage. Second, you may have to keep converting documents to whichever file format becomes dominant before the old one is abandoned. First, you have to keep moving the data to new storage systems before the old one fails or becomes unreadable. Making digital documents last for ever therefore involves two processes.
#How to get pictures from icloud to external hard drive portable#
jpg/jpeg picture file format developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group may well last “for ever” despite efforts to replace it with JPEG 2000, PNG (Portable Network Graphics), SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), SPIFF (Still Picture Interchange File Format), BPG (Better Portable Graphics), FLIF (Free Lossless Image Format), HEIF (High Efficiency Image Format, aka HEIC in Apple’s iOS 11), and Google’s WebP, among others.
#How to get pictures from icloud to external hard drive software#
Operating systems, software and file formats also keep changing, so being able to see a file doesn’t mean you can load it. The photos might be safe but I won’t know unless I buy something that can read them.
#How to get pictures from icloud to external hard drive zip#
I still have data on 8in, 5.25in and 3.5in floppy disks, Iomega Zip disks and quarter-inch tapes. To be really safe, you should have more than one copy of each photo, stored in more than one way in more than one place.ĭigital data is a particular problem because storage formats change all the time.
