The Practical Guide to Hard Drives

Every photo organizer and digital archivist uses hard drives, but I see alarming mistakes including:

1. Buying decisions that waste money
2. Slow drives that waste time
3. Bad formats that put your data at risk
4. Incomplete backup strategies that put your business at risk

Hard drives are essential to the work you do and the projects you deliver to your clients, but there's so much confusion and so many mistakes when it comes to something so basic. You work at the intersection of physical memories and digital technology, so it's essential that your data is as safe as possible and that you work as efficiently as possible.

I created this course to share everything I know about hard drives from 30 years in technology so that you can implement best practices, enjoy peace of mind, and work with confidence about your most important data.

You’ll learn how to:

In this course you're going to learn the fundamentals of digital storage and how to choose and format hard drives for optimal speed and reliability, including:

• Different kinds of hard drives including USB thumb drives, conventional spinning hard disk drives, SSD, NVME, RAID, and NAS
• How to choose the best hard drive for your needs
• How to format hard drives and thumb drives for different situations including Mac computers, Windows computers, cross-platform environments, client projects, Apple Photos, and even smart TVs
• Photo Backup Best Practices to keep your data safe
• Common mistakes to avoid and common myths to ignore

Who's this course for?

• Professional photo organizers who need to ensure their data is safe and that they're working as smart as possible
• Digital archivists working with computers that want to be confident they're storing their digital files safely
• Mac users who want to be more familiar with hard drives on Windows
• And Windows users who want to be more familiar with hard drives on a Mac
• Anybody who needs to manage data in a cross-platform world

Course Includes

• An hour and a half (1:24) of self-paced video training in 22 lessons
• My recommendations for the best drives for every situation
• A simple checklist to choose the right drive format for every project
• A foolproof backup plan
• A digital copy of my Visual Guide to Computer Cables poster ($20 value)
• Downloadable transcripts for every lesson for reference and note taking (PDF)
• Access on computer, tablet, or smart phone
• Immediate access to all lessons with no expiration

Enjoy the the first three lessons for free and check out the course curriculum below.