But now you've introduced a very high risk of human error, of failing to keep the disks in sync. Independently creating two separate archive disks with the same content? Maybe you avoid the risk of copying errors from one to the other. I have Affinity photo on my pc, but there is no organizational tool with it. I should clarify that I have my images organized very simply in per-year folders with per-month subfolders I'm not currently using a DAM program. Because our family will be using PC's and Macs over the years, I want the images accessible to either system. I just want a large-capacity drive (or two drives in an enclosure, one for photos and one for videos)) that I can connect once a month or so to store my ever-growing library of images and videos. (I believe that serving the drive would also preclude storing a Lightroom catalog there.) If you have one laptop serve the drive over the network to the other, the client wouldn't see the underlying drive format, but you'd still need to be careful about concurrent access to the same files. This assumes that you're talking about physically moving the drive from one system to another using it on only one system at a time. As for NTFS and HFS+, you'd need third party drivers to read and write either of those formats on the other system. Some systems limit FAT32 volumes to 32 GB. I want both systems to be able to access the files, so is ExFAT the format to go with? Yes, each computer has its own external backup drive (each drive partitioned one partition for full computer backup, another partition strictly for photo and video files manually organized into folders), plus I use Amazon's service for off-site storage.

I hope you mean 'one master drive + two or more cloned backups'. I would like one large drive to store all my photos long-term. Note, not a backup of your archive (which might only replicate errors). If you would find that onerous and want to reduce the risk, you might consider create two identical archives on two separate disks, updating both at the same time.

If you can recreate your archive from the (backed up) sources with a reasonable amount of work, then one disk is probably an acceptable risk. Think about what you would do when (rather than if) your archive disk fails. Your only defences are regular integrity checking, backups and multiple copies.

Disks of any make/type can fail at any time, sometimes it's not immediately obvious, some errors may be automatically recovered by the disk itself (bad block remapping), silently, with or without file corruption. Just make sure you always dismount the drive before disconnecting it and you should be fine. More to the point, how reliable is it for long-term storage? Or is longevity based more on the physical qualities of the drive?

Exfat or ntfs for mac