A number of people have asked me if I thought having and using The Photo Stick was a good idea. From its ad on Amazon, it lists the following information:

• Fast- find and save 1000 photos in ten minutes. Saves 60,000 average size photos and videos. Works on both Mac and Windows. 128GB of storage.
• Super easy to use – No passwords, no filenames, no cloud storage
• Finds duplicates. Safe – just store in a safe location. Eliminate the vulnerabilities of the cloud.

On the surface, The Photo Stick is a good idea and I have no problem telling people to go ahead and buy one. (I don’t sell them directly but I may receive compensation if you purchase one through the link below.)

I do, however, want to remind you that The Photo Stick is a hard drive and all hard drives crash. Since it’s a solid state hard drive, it would tend to last longer than a traditional, motor-driven hard drive, but eventually, it will go bad. With that in mind, I would never use this USB device as my primary backup of my photos. Additionally, USB drives can be lost, affected by heat and cold, dropped and damaged or, worse yet, go through the washing machine and wiped out by water. (In all these cases, I’m speaking from personal experience.) Thus, the reason for “just store in a safe location.”

Although their advertisement speaks to “the vulnerabilities of the cloud,” I would suggest to you that, if you use strong passwords and a well-known cloud service (iCloud, OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive), there’s no problem.

In summation, The Photo Stick seems like a fine product and I’ve heard good things about it. (I don’t own one myself.) While it has some good features (finding duplicates, easy to use), I would still caution you that it should not be the primary backup for your photos.