How to back up 1TB of photos from a hard drive to online storage?

[SaraBarca]

A few years ago our hard drive failed and I lost a lot of photos (mostly baby ones) - in the end I had to pay for a data retrieval company to get them back.

Since then I have periodically took our photos off our iphone, onto the laptop (windows) and then transferred them on 2 separate hard drives to hopefully back them up without fail.

I'd like to now put all our photos online as it feels a bit precarious. But how best to do this with such a lot of photos?

Thanks for any suggestions

If you use Microsoft 365 (what used to be called Office 365) you have 1TB of storage on OneDrive per person for 6 people, so more than enough. I would use that and get OneDrive to do the copy. It will take a long time but, once it is there, the photos will be safe.

If you haven't got Microsoft 365 you will have to pay for the space. OneDrive would cost around £19.90 per month (so it would actually be cheaper to get Microsoft 365 which costs £79.99 per year), Dropbox is £9.99 per month and gives you 2TB, Google Drive is £7.99 per month or £79.99 per year and gives you 2TB.

Remember, it's not backed up unless you have it on three devices in at least two physical locations.

I like onedrive, you can easily set it to synchronise folders between devices, if you have Windows 10 it integrates seamlessly i tk your folders and you can get large amounts of stirage, I using secured storage for aow price if yih get an office subscription.

It will take a while to backup 1TB of photos over a broadband connection. The key question is what upload speed do you have?

Your headline speed is download speed, upload speed will be less. If you have the slowest basic ADSL then it will take weeks. If you have fast fibre then it won't take too long.

I'm hoping to do the same OP! I've just discovered Google Photos and Mylio for online storage but haven't tried them yet. Does anyone else know about them?

Thank you for the replies, v helpful, I will give One Drive a go I think as we do have Office.

As you say CruelAndUnusualParenting I do have a slow internet connection which is quite a problem when it comes to 1TB of photos - will it be a case of uploading each folder indivdually. This will be quite a project if so!

@SaraBarca

Nope, you install onedrive or just login with your Microsoft account on Windows 10 and add the folders you want backing up.

It will then synchronise in the background as you are using your computer, or just leave it switched on. The first time may take a few days, but after that should be very quick to add additional photos.

Thanks FixTheBone, good to know. I will begin the process asap - I hope with two hard drives and a cloud back up the data will be safe enough.

I would suggest you use something like FreeFileSync to do any updates after the initial copy as it will only copy the files that change.

It will also sync your drives.