Hmm, others might disagree with me, but personally I would avoid anything to do with trusting M$ to look after my data on the other side of the world.
It is far cheaper and more instantly accessible to buy a few stand-alone drives eg this Seagate 2.5" 1TB SATA living in caddies eg this USB3 type. Faster ‘hybrid’ and SSD drives are more expensive, but as a backup this is all one needs.
However if you want to be really sure of keeping your data secure and need faster access than through the foggy ‘cloud’, get one (some) of these Synology DS218 dual-drive Raid machines with the Seagate (or WD) drives; it can also be your NAS server should you wish. Note that the prices float all over the place depending on availability of the different makes of HDDs (I paid about this price only a year ago with the more expensive WD Red drives fitted).
The great thing here is to also buy a third drive the same, and in the unlikely event of one of the two in the box failing, just swap in the spare, and it automatically rebuilds the RAID image for you.
My Synology boxes share an Eaton UPS with network bits and security system.
Of course all this is as nothing, if you don’t also have a decent scheduled back-up routine in operation.
Have to admit I removed the line in my reply saying pretty much the same thing. I remember reading of one poor person who had moved all his family photos to OneDrive to clear space making it literally an eggs in one basket example - without warning MS deleted his account, and they don’t keep the data, or at least didn’t back then so he lost many years worth of family photos.
Also I’d avoid WD due to the fact I’m on my 5th WD drive which amazingly is still going (the other 4 were all warranty replacements leading up to this 5th). It’s true I’ve had 1 Seagate fail, but that’s out of 4 Seagates.
With photos I believe you should make one of those photo books each year with the highlights, or for a specific topic e.g. birthday or wedding so that you have something physical in case of data loss.
I appreciate that doesn’t protect from fire or theft.
A lot of the online providers give 15gb for free, OneDrive, Google drive etc, just only store non confidential files.
But yes an external drive can also work, just keep it safe.
you can simply sync up to the cloud and only download when you want to use them OR
you have all the data on your machine AND the cloud.
Been using Onedrive as part of the 365 subscription service for over 5 years and so have many clients. No problems ever.
shop around for price as MS 365 is always on offer somewhere (and when it comes to renewal, turn off auto renew and go buy another years somewhere else, it will let you use the code supplied each time to extend)
for example one user version £59.99 at MS, but here £39.50…
Also you can buy up to five years of codes in advance and just put them into your account all at one go
You think M$ doesn’t have access to your current hard Drive?
If you are paranoid enough to not trust their cloud services …ponder how they know when you need a patch / security update,…and the access you give them to download that update…
M$ has no access from outside the machine, and the log files on my modem show no access to or from M$ or unknown IP addresses.
I don’t allow any auto functions or remote access.
This PC does not have errors (touch wood) so no need to send reports.
My machine is old and no longer has updates offered, and they would always have been applied only when I allowed them after checking their intention, never auto. The “Improvement Service” is now redundant so it’s switched off.
I don’t use any modern M$ software which still has (ie requires) updates.
The only paid for service is Norton, until M$ buys them out.
Same for me. There have been ‘querks’ along the way but overall, it’s not bad. You also get access to Outlook, Word, Excel etc. Our Android phones both back up (photos) to OneDrive automatically and with the MS apps, it’s optional. I won’t say it’s perfect but what is? Yes, it will save space on laptops etc and all being well, your data is being backup up.
OneDrive can be used as an automatic backup and a repository as others have said but if your issue is that you need to free up space on the laptop, you probably need to think about plug in storage.
One option is to connect a SSD or old fashioned HDD to your router and use it as a network drive. You won’t necessarily see a speed difference between the two drive types as you are moving data across your LAN but SSDs are cheap nowadays. Keep in mind that historically SSDs tend to fail without warning unlike the reassuring bag of spanners sound of a failing HDD.