Do I need a large capacity hard drive?

In the past, a common theme among computer users and genealogists was a concern about file sizes, storing photos, and having enough computer memory to run certain programs. Fortunately, those days are long over. But genealogists are innately conservative and I still find quite a few who worry about how much stuff they can store on their hard drives and computers.

If you are still using an "older" computer it may be time to upgrade your computer. Computer systems that include a desktop computer, monitor and a 1 TB internal hard drive start at just over $200. Yes, that number is correct. An entire computer system including a large monitor for around $200. However, if you want the latest and fastest computers available with a huge screen, say over 40 inches, you might spend as much a $10,000 or more. This huge disparity in pricing reflects the fact that basic computers, especially older or reconditioned models, are really inexpensive. But it also reflects the fact that the speed and capabilities of new computers vastly exceed the needs of most genealogists. You can do well today walking into a Costco, Best Buy, Sam's Club, or Walmart and buying any of the computers on display.

What do all these newer computers have in common? Huge internal hard drive storage. At the time of this post, there is now a one terabyte flash drive (aka thumb drive). One terabyte of storage is huge and likely more than many people would fill up in years of work. But if you are still concerned about storage space the price of very large hard drives is still dropping rapidly. You can always plug an external hard drive into your computer, either desktop or laptop, and use that device for storage. In fact, having at least one external hard drive for storage is an inexpensive way to back up all your files. Both the Mac OSX and Windows operating systems have built-in automatic backup programs.

If you are at all concerned about preserving your work, you can do what I do, use multiple external hard drives and automatically back up all of them to an online backup service, BackBlaze.com.

Now if you are storing huge amounts of data, say 200,000 high-resolution photos or something like that, you can buy very large hard drives for very reasonable prices. A 4 TB external hard drive can be purchased on Amazon for under $100. However, the least expensive hard drive based on the cost per unit of storage right now is an 8 TB hard drive for about $139.  A 10 TB hard drive is about $269 and 12 TB hard drives are now starting to come down in price but they are still expensive at over $600.

There is really no excuse for failing to back up your data.