One aspect of digital photography that makes me really nervous is having a hard drive (HD) crash and losing all of the files, which includes lots and lots of digital photo images. So it has been my practice that I run two external hard drives that essentially mirror the contents of each other, although my process is old tech versus using RAID drives & the like which can perform this automatically. If you have not had the crappy experience of losing a hard drive or a computer crashing, you are lucky and trust me, it can happen. I have been told by more than one IT person; it’s not a question of IF but WHEN.
When I made the transition last year from PC to my iMac I did not take into consideration that the external HDs that I was using (Western Digital’s My Book) for the PC might not be fully compatible with the iMac. The My Book HD connected to the iMac does allow me to access and down load the data/files to my iMac; it’s that I cannot write anything onto this older hard drive. Thus these old HD (one 3Tb and one 4Tb storage) which was configured for my PC are now archive HD, which may also be a good thing, that while working on my iMac I might not inadvertently wipe out some files. Nevertheless, anything new has to go onto another HD configured for the iMac.
This post is not about which HD to purchase, although my decision to try the G-Technology was the ability to leverage the USB-C (thunderbolt) connection which is really fast, but I also like the idea of stacking these with the ability to use the top side to store something. I will also admit I have a couple of dead WD external HDs that give me cause to look elsewhere.
I acquired the first G-Tech HD (both 4 Tb storage) at the same time as the iMac and recently acquired a second G-Tech HD as the first one was playing really nice with the iMac.
Then it was all about taking the time to transfer all of the back-up data to the 2nd G-Tech HD. I will have to admit it was nice doing this while still working on other tasks as it seems that the G-Tech HD with the USB-C works really well with the iMac; in the past with the older PC and the old USB on the My Book is became an either-or situation; just not enough band-width to do both at the same time. As well as the really slow transfer speeds with the My Book and PC, I would wait until the evening so that the four or five hours to move the various files could run overnight while I slept; otherwise just too frustrating to realize that I was essentially locked out of doing any other tasks while the back-up was in progress. So I have been really happy with this new external HD combination with the iMac.
So take my advice and back-up your digital photo files onto at least one external hard drive.
Feature photograph; G-Technology Hard Drive 2019 copyright Douglas Stockdale
Singular Images 
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