Best option for storing my photos

Hi, everyone. A newbie here, looking for some storage advice.

I had recently purchased a Canon EOS 800D and given the enthusiasm with which I make a thousand photos per day and the size of each of these photos, I quickly ran out of disc space on my rather old MacBook Pro. 
So I started looking at other options to store my creations. Since there is so much info out there & it's difficult to process everything, I decided to ask you guys for help. Which are the solutions you find optimal in terms of pricing, ease of use, etc. I would prefer a cloud solution, I don’t want to purchase any hardware. I would really appreciate it if you could share the reasons behind your decision so that I can make an informed choice. 

All advice welcome and appreciated.

I prefer storing on physical hard drives because it works best for my workflow. I find it the quickest to work with versus relying on bandwidth for uploads and downloads to the cloud for files I may want to work on. You stated that you would prefer to not purchase any hardware. You may find a solution using a combination of hardware and the cloud. Using a physical drive will allow to you create a quick back up on location and then allow you time to upload to the cloud for storage at a later time. You can always carry a small external hard drive but you may not always have bandwidth you can rely on.

I was in a similar situation to you. I ended up going with the portable external SSD drives. They have become fairly inexpensive anymore. I was able to purchase a 1 TB external SSD for under $100.

Internal/External hard drives for me for everything and cloud storage for the images I share with family or are very important. I generally have 4~6 copies of every image in various storage forms but mostly hard drives.

I also use some cloud storage, on SmugMug website for some photos as well.

luciafilley wrote in post #19065703
Hi, everyone. A newbie here, looking for some storage advice.

I had recently purchased a Canon EOS 800D and given the enthusiasm with which I make a thousand photos per day and the size of each of these photos, I quickly ran out of disc space on my rather old MacBook Pro. 
So I started looking at other options to store my creations. Since there is so much info out there & it's difficult to process everything, I decided to ask you guys for help. Which are the solutions you find optimal in terms of pricing, ease of use, etc. I would prefer a cloud solution, I don’t want to purchase any hardware. I would really appreciate it if you could share the reasons behind your decision so that I can make an informed choice. 

All advice welcome and appreciated.

So typically the way you shoot are you doing RAW + JPEG, JPEG only, or what? And since you say you shoot a "thousand photos per day", do you also go in and clean out things, or do you just want to stuff everything away for something in the future?

luciafilley wrote in post #19065703
and given the enthusiasm with which I make a thousand photos per day

I would imagine if you carry on like that, you'll soon be filling up any hard drive you might end up buying.

Certainly online cloud storage would end up costing a bit too, if you felt the need to store everything there.

Personally, I have two external hard drives. I back up my images and all other files pretty much when i've initially finished with them, then every few weeks, i'll back up to the other drive too, for safe keeping.

So, for me, it would be 2 x 2tb hard drives

I don't know if you are exaggerating when you say 1000 photos a day. And is this for every day of the year? 365,000 photos a year? But 366,000 this year because it is a leap year.

Ansel Adams once said “Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.”

Everybody's needs and wants are different, but I would say the first thing you should do is figure out how to manage your photo collection and what to keep. All good collections need curating. Most people would want to toss out unsuccessful photos and near-dupes, keeping only the ones they would want to look at again.

Depending on your requirements, that might still leave you with a lot of photos. Like others here, I keep most of my original photos on an external hard drive. This facilitates backing up and migrating to other computers. More recent photos are on my booting drive.

So that is what I would suggest. Get rid of unnecessary photos and store the keepers on the online drives of your computer. Back everything up according to your backup preferences.

Archibald wrote in post #19065895
I don't know if you are exaggerating when you say 1000 photos a day. And is this for every day of the year? 365,000 photos a year? But 366,000 this year because it is a leap year.

Important to understand that you will have used up the life of your shutter, and may likely have paid for a new shutter to be installaed if shooting 365000 shots per year! That 800D has a rated lifetime of only 150000 shots statictically...yours might last 100 shots or it could last 500000 shots, your mileage will vary!

Archibald wrote in post #19065895
Depending on your requirements, that might still leave you with a lot of photos. Like others here, I keep most of my original photos on an external hard drive. This facilitates backing up and migrating to other computers. More recent photos are on my booting drive.

So that is what I would suggest. Get rid of unnecessary photos and store the keepers on the online drives of your computer. Back everything up according to your backup preferences.

I agree with above statements, and I will add...

1. one choice is how your laptop connects to your external harddrive(s) or SSD...USB vs. ethernet network. Even if your laptop 'only has' USB 2 support ports, you want an external USB harddrive enclosure with USB 3 support (it is backward compatible with USB 2) so when you upgrade your laptop to one with USB 3 support, you are not hobbled by the external enclosure.
   A benefit of ethernet network connection is that the USB support level does not matter, as PCs generally support 'the latest' in ethernet port speeds.
   
2. another choice is whether or not the external device supports RAID...RAID 1 has two (or four) harddrives and a pair of HD mirror each other automatically, so that if one harddrive fails you replace it and the RAID rebuilds the new harddrive to duplicate the failed harddrive automatically...data redundancy. Harddrives FAIL, the only question is 'When'!