Choosing a drive
urVault works with any drive your server can see — internal, USB, or NAS. But since you're trusting it with the photos you can't re-take, here's honest advice on what to buy, what to avoid, and how to check a new drive before you rely on it.
The usual mistake is buying too small. Backups accumulate — new photos, new versions, older copies you keep for safety. A good rule: look at what you're backing up today and buy about three times that. A phone with 128 GB of photos is comfortable on a 1 TB drive for years.
One phone
Plenty for a single device's photos and videos, with years of headroom. The cheapest way to get started.
A family
The sweet spot for several phones plus a computer. Best price per terabyte right now, and — usefully in 2026 — these sizes stayed in stock while the big ones didn't.
Everything, forever
Whole-household archives with version history. Usually a desktop drive with its own power supply rather than a pocket one.
For backups, a normal spinning hard drive is the better buy — you get several times the capacity for the money, and backup speed is limited by your network long before the drive becomes the bottleneck. SSDs are worth it if the drive travels with you and might get knocked about. Right now they also cost far more per terabyte than usual.
This matters more for backups than for anything else you'll buy. Counterfeit drives report a large size to your computer while containing a fraction of the real storage. They accept your files and report success — then silently discard anything past the real capacity. Nothing looks wrong until the day you try to restore, which is exactly the day you can't afford a surprise.
Worth doing with any new drive, from any seller. Free tools write test data across the whole drive and read it back to confirm the capacity is genuine and the disk is healthy: H2testw (Windows) or F3 (Linux and macOS). It takes a few hours for a large drive, and it is the only way to know for certain before your files depend on it.
Do it once, when the drive arrives — while you can still return it.
Stick to the manufacturers who actually make the disks — Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Samsung and SanDisk — and buy from the manufacturer directly or from a retailer selling its own stock rather than a third-party marketplace seller. That one habit removes most counterfeit risk. We don't list specific model numbers here because stock and prices are changing week to week.
If you last bought a drive a couple of years ago, the price will be a shock. Demand from AI data centres has consumed most of the world's drive and memory production — manufacturers have sold out much of their output well in advance, and prices have risen sharply across hard drives, SSDs and memory cards alike. Industry forecasts don't expect real relief until around 2028.
Two practical consequences. Mid-size drives are the bargain — 4–5 TB models stayed available and reasonably priced precisely because data centres don't want them. And if a deal looks impossible in this market, it is — this is exactly the climate in which fake drives spread.
urVault backs up to a drive you already own just as happily as to a new one. If there's a spare external drive in a desk somewhere, start there — you can always move to a bigger one later.
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