wd my passport external hard drive format for mac

The benefit of local storage on the Mac is that you can view your library offline and back it up externally the benefit of local storage on iPhone and iPad is instant access and offline access only. What about iPhone and iPad? You can pay top dollar for 1TB iPhones and iPads, but creating local backups on external storage isn’t really a thing. If you pay the price upfront, it’s possible you can house your whole photo library locally and still backup to an external hard drive with Time Machine on a regular basis.

1TB solid-state drives were super premium back then (and they’re still higher tier for MacBooks), but new machines come with options for 2TB, 4TB, and even 8TB SSDs. One thing that has changed since 2015 – storage limits on new MacBooks have increased a lot.

It’s not the most attractive method, but it’s good backup hygiene for your collection of memories. The critical step is to keep a regularly updated Time Machine backup on a separate external drive. Either you have enough internal storage, or you connect enough external storage to have every photo and video if you library download locally.

My method from seven years ago remains the best strategy today for desktop users. I would wager that the majority of users are on iPhone – Mac desktops probably rank last. The easiest way to keep an offline copy of your photo library is … own a desktop Mac. iCloud Photos really doesn’t encourage methods of keeping separate, offline copies of photos and videos. It’s really just your photo library in a single place - even if you don’t use Optimize Storage. Keeping a local backup of your photo library is mighty important. Still, iCloud Photos backups shouldn’t be ignored. Have a 300GB photo library? With an iCloud subscription and Optimize Storage, you don’t need a 512GB or 1TB iPhone to take your media with you. ICloud Photos is a fantastic feature for syncing large photo and video libraries across all your devices.

Wd my passport external hard drive format for mac