"Are you dealing with data recovery from an external hard drive?"
Me: "Did you put all your wedding photos on an external hard drive and now it's not working?"
"Yes, how did you know?" 🙂
I knew because this exact story comes to me far too often.
Being the good Israelis we are, there's no way we'd pay 8 shekels a month for a proper, organized cloud backup through Google. Instead of this incredibly convenient and dirt-cheap option, we'd rather buy a sketchy HDD, wait for our entire digital lives to get wiped out, and then either say goodbye to our data forever or pay for recovery (starting at 3,000 shekels on a good day).
**Why back up with Google specifically?**
Because Google Photos' compression algorithm does a remarkable job. It can reduce the storage size of photos and videos by more than 90%, with a quality difference that's usually barely visible to the naked eye.
What that means in practice: 100 GB of Google cloud storage will cover more than 1 TB worth of photos and videos.
On top of that, you can install **Google Drive for Desktop** and set up automatic backups for specific folders on your computer.
What else? Set up automatic backup once in the Google Photos app on your smartphone, and every photo you take will be backed up automatically. Your storage space is also shared with your Gmail inbox and can be shared with other family members.
Still determined to back up to an external hard drive? Buy only an SSD, despite the higher price. HDDs are mechanical drives with moving parts, and they tend to fail relatively quickly.
Yesterday was World Backup Day (yes, that's a real thing), and it's the perfect time to take responsibility for your data and make sure it's not facing extinction. 🦖