Beginner Backing up and organising

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Hi, forgive me if this has been asked before but I hope to get some advice nonetheless.

I have about 10 years' worth of photos (c. 1TB) which are currently stored :

(i) on an external hard drive (in folders by year); and

(ii) on my Apple (mainly on my Mac's hard drive as the cloud upload is not complete, more on that below)

What is on the external hard drive is mainly uploaded from SD cards from my 'proper' cameras and what is on Apple is mainly snapshots from my phone (important memories nonetheless!) but also some uploads from SD cards.

I have spent a great deal of time, with Apple support, trying to get all my photos on iCloud but so this is still work on progress, having been on an off Apple support since January (don't ask).

I am now beginning to think that all my efforts with Apple may not be proportionate to what I will ultimately achieve. I thought that 'Photos' would give me a tool to not only save but also organise my photos, create albums, folders etc... but.... is it going to be too basic?

Is it worth getting Lightroom? If so, which version? Every time I google Lightroom I get confused by the options and reticent about the price. Having said that I do not want to buy into a system which may lose support in a few years time, so any free online storage systems fill me with suspicion.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Happy Sunday.
 
Lightroom may help, however what you need first off is a back-up strategy in place before you do anything else, you have ten years of possibly important memories that are probably in a volatile state of storage.

A definite step in the right direction by using cloud storage.

At a bare minimum (personally) I would be looking at storing on a couple of external hard drives (EHD) in addition to your current storage, one of those EHD's preferably should be stored off site at say a relations house.

You really need to schedule your back-ups, there are a number of apps for the Mac that will help you here...
 
If I've understood you correctly, it seems that you have your photos divided into two cateogories, with one category only on a single external hard drive and the other only on your Mac. This is dangerous, as hard disks fail. Inevitably, invariably. It's a question of "when", not "if". So the first thing to do is to make sure that you're adequately protected against the time that this will happen.

As Phil said, as a bare minimum, you need at least one other identical copy, and ideally two or more. You need also to be certain that any corruptions that occur on your main drive aren't duplicated onto the backup. I have seen recent posts from people who have found that some software seems to have created problems with files; and if these are then used to replace your backed up files with duff copies, you have a problem. The offsite advice is to cover against fire and theft etc.

Organising the results is going to depend on how much effort you want to put into it, and how far you want to go in classifying. It's easier to have (say) people and places as categories, but become much more work when "people" expands to individuals, further divided into "smiling", "frowning", "at home", "at place X" etc. This is information that you're going to have to enter manually, and ideally you'll plan what you want before starting.

But first, make sure that your photos are safe.
 
I put all my pics on amazon drive. Took a few days to up load but they are all there now
 
Have you thought about Google? If you are willing to sacrifice a bit of quality, they give you unlimited storage, automatically storing your images by date (and giving you options to create other albums). They make your image file sizes smaller automatically at some cost to quality, but actually do a pretty good job of it.
 
Brilliant was just starting to look at storage as the lap top is not in best health, hard drive is backed up to an external but wanted some sort of cloud option.
- didnt know Amazon had cloud storage - free to Prime members - result
 
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