Well, "inexpensive" is relative to the buyer, but...

I would consider a 6TB a waste of money and something that I would need to replace way too soon. The smallest I use currently are 12TB drives.  My preferred is G-Tech --

    https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1360172-REG/g_technology_0g05383_g_drive_pro_12tb_7200_2x.html

For my serious work, I use a 96TB drive though.  These 12TB drives are on my wife's laptop, one for external storage and a second one for TimeMachine.  (I haven't decided what to do yet when that TM is no longer large enough -- ran out of space on a 8TB TM last month...)

Any disk can break. From the cheapest to the most expensive.

So keep everything in at least two places - one disk + online, or two disks.

4TB drives are quite affordable and if one breaks, it's a lot faster to replace the content (that you of course would have a copy of) than 12TB...

I organize my content by location and year, so it's easy to find the right disk when I need it.

Quote from: mindstorm on August 08, 2019, 01:57

Well, "inexpensive" is relative to the buyer, but...

I would consider a 6TB a waste of money and something that I would need to replace way too soon. The smallest I use currently are 12TB drives.  My preferred is G-Tech --

    https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1360172-REG/g_technology_0g05383_g_drive_pro_12tb_7200_2x.html

For my serious work, I use a 96TB drive though.  These 12TB drives are on my wife's laptop, one for external storage and a second one for TimeMachine.  (I haven't decided what to do yet when that TM is no longer large enough -- ran out of space on a 8TB TM last month...)

I prefer to use smaller disks, as main disks and as backup disks.
If a smaller disk fails the risk to lose a huge quantity of data is less.

Quite right and also you can back up finished stock photos on to cloud based storage too

I highly recommend you also use online backup. I use backblaze.com. Recently my computer had a power failure and shutdown abruptly which caused my external hard drive to become unresponsive. After I turned my computer back on, I couldn't figure out how to mount my external hard drive despite hours of google search. So I spent about a week non-stop downloading 3TB of data from cloud backup.

I buy two of whatever the current WD MyBook drives that are around $80 or so.  I just bought two 2TB at Best Buy for $70 each.  Takes me about six months to fill them (one is a backup of the other).  Never had an issue.

I've in the past bought two which were literally DoA, but their identical replacements are still working today. 

Yea I'm sure someone smarter than me could have figured out how to mount my non working external hard drive. Since I couldn't figure it out, online cloud backup still saved my butt. Also remember online backup also helps in event of fire or theft.

I'm taking 3 separate hard disk backup 

I'm taking 3 separate hard disk backup 

Pretty much the answer. Any disk can go bad. The newer are much more reliable, but stuff happens. Mine is, the computer for working files, the backup as the year goes on an another external that's only connected and running when I need it. There's no need to have the disks spinning all the time. In fact they go to sleep now.

If you are a big data consumer, I will recommend to opt for external SSD hard disk.
I have purchased a 1 TB few months back and gets 300 mb/s transfer speed. Big time saver here.

Good idea, except for the expense, the time and speed is noticeable and less moving parts. Latest desktop and laptop I installed SSD drives. Gotta love that!

Working backups, I imagine the SSD would be good to have. My backups are generally, just storage. I start the backup process and go to sleep, it's usually done by morning. ;-)

three copies on external usb disks (wd element 2.5 disks) encrypted with bitlocker (i'm on windows)

Three days ago i had a problem with my tech 8 terabyte external data with thunderbolt connection, a bomb with 350 mb speed, is the thunderbolt 1...iit slowed a lot like impossible to work. i used disk warrior, best software i bought in the last 10 years, and he said the disk was broken and should copy all....i had a copy of all i thought but instead i was not covered for 3 years...began copying very slow the files and after 10 hours the disk began working again normally. i noticed that the macbook pro led charger was very very pale, green pale and near impossible to see, i think it was a problem with the macbook not having enough power at this point...any way bought two more 8 tb wd book and coy bought so i have near three copy and the original. two move in different location.

never stress enough...BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP....losing photos is like losing part of us.

Friends call me paranoid but here�s what I do:
I never delete memory cards before I perform a series of backups.
First, a copy of shot photos and videos goes to internal drive of PC tower.
Then this goes for a brief time, once, to an external HDD but is then deleted.
After that, the unedited material is copied always twice or sometimes three times to single or double side Blu Ray disks, as data.
The same happens with edited material that goes to two or three new Blu Ray disks.
Aside that, the edited stuff is all uploaded to a web drive online and I extra pay for a fast transfer among FTPs.
The cost for Blu Ray disks is the same with buying an external disk but I prefer to spread the danger.
Naturally the Blu Ray data spins slower that the HDD and you have to change disks and use a Blu Ray drive, but the lack of movable mechanical parts promises the disks will last more than the drives.
For those that wish to avoid the hassle, I suggest they buy 2 external HDDs and every two years, that prices drop, buy a new with double capacity to perform a third backup of the two first.

P.S. At day work, we use the 6,25 TB data cartridges for backup but the cost for buing the hardware to backup and restore these is out of the question!