Quote Originally Posted by Irving View Post
Thank you everyone. I'll give Microcenter a call to find out if they report as I'd probably prefer them over Office Depot.

Cstone, I like your idea. The only HDD I still have are probably not something I'd want to use, but that is a great idea for the future.

Brian, I didn't specify anything because I don't really know. I'll have to check if my lap top has 3.0 USB or not, cool if it does, no biggie if it doesn't.

The plan in my head is to download the years of photos I've built up on Google to free up space there, then download new photos once a year or so. I've never backed anything up in my life, so I'd like to figure out a simple routine to do so, then do it every 3 months or so. Once I free up space from Google, I'll have plenty of room in their free cloud storage for what I need, but why not have a physical back up as well?

Besides the photos, I don't have more data to store than a few text documents, so speed shouldn't be terribly important.
Google photos is unlimited storage if you allow it to shrink your image resolution. You can also use Google Takeout to save all your photos (or any other google data) into compressed files for which you can specify the max size. Then download them to local storage. While the files are likely to exist on the local machine, I've run into cases where the G drive space is full yet there was more space used for photo storage (from mobile devices) that wasn't syncing back to the user's computer. Since there's no simple way to "select all" and download photos, Takeout solved the problem. Never hurts to have all that data stuffed away somewhere safe - offline.

As to just storing everything in the cloud. Been discussed here before. Unless you're getting offline versioning, the files are still susceptible to a ransomware infection.