That is for non-iPhone photos.
iPhone photos live in iPhoto (I'll keep calling it that.)

I will have a full iPhoto library always on one of the SSDs, and use an old Mac (2013) to sync those.

Then there is some subset of selects that live in Lightroom. There is no rhyme/reason.

Shield, honestly not sure of the difference

It all started with a 500GB old spin drive, and just ended up being upgrades over the years as the size of the library grew. So the simpler version is 1 backup service and 1 onsite external drive. :)

iCloud, Seagate spinning backup with time machine, and external m.2 SSD

Synology NAS for a full local copy of it, mirrored to a 8TB slow drive

And then I have 2 Samsung T7s, 2 T5s and 1 custom thunderbolt 3 2TB SSD that has as many photos on them as possible, and goes 2000MB/second

It's a bit of a system:

First: always getting a 2TB laptop. It's expensive but the time wasted on file management is OOF.

Then: Dropbox all the files up. Keep selective sync of the last few years.

Regardless of the direction you go in: 
1. Always have a secure online backup.
2. Always have a secondary local backup. (SSDs imo are the best, which I had pre-NAS)
3. Preferably have a snap shot of your backup on a monthly basis. Some times you mess up and don't know.

Samsung has a 1 tb ssd for like $109 thats been fantastic. Fast read/write and from what I've read low fail rate.

Hardware can fail or be lost- I use Dropbox for everything. Their Mac app has online/offline settings which makes saving storage space a breeze.

I do weekly backups to my external drive (it’s a LaCie rugged, either 1 or 2TB) which then also backs up weekly to backblaze.

Do you have the shield or regular one? I was looking at it earlier and wasn’t sure if the shield was better or not

Thanks for the detailed reply!! Don’t think I’ll be able to afford all that back up right now but I’ll remember this for the future! Until now I’ve only needed extra storage for my photos but I’ve been building up files too so I definitely want to make sure those are stored too.

What do y'all use for back ups? I just use iCloud rn but I'm looking to buy an external hard drive to store my pics and docs (even though I'm terrified to 🥲)

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