WD My Passport Review - Photo Storage for your travels

Taking photos is one of the pleasures and problems of travel. I love trying to capture every memory in my images; that glorious view, golden sunset, or delicious meal. But from even the shortest trips I probably come home with hundreds or even thousands of photos. These are the photos that I use to illustrate the articles I write on this blog, to share on my social media channels and possibly to use for projects in the future.

They are also the photos of my husband, friends or family that encapsulate the memories of each trip. For both personal and professional reasons I’d hate to lose any of those photos. That’s why on my recent Uniworld cruise I was pleased to try out the Western Digital My Passport, an external hard drive to store photos and other data.

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Before I left for my cruise I made sure I tried out the My Passport, and lucky I did so, as I discovered that in order to use with my Apple Mac I’d need to format it.

On the box, it says that the My Passport is Compatible with Windows 8, Windows 7 or Windows Vista and requires reformatting for Mac OS. The small leaflet that came in the box directed me to http://products.wd.com/docs and when I did a search on that page I came to instructions on how to format the My Passport for Mac, which took around 10 minutes.

WD My Passport Ultra Photo: Heatheronhertravels.com — WD My Passport Ultra

The WD My Passport is pretty neat in size – around 11cm x 8cm so it was no problem to pack it along with all my other leads, adapters and batteries. I liked the slim, white, shiny feel of the hard drive, even though that has no bearing on its ability to store the photos! The version I have will store up to 1 TB of data, that’s 1000 GB of storage, and after my week’s trip I had only used 6 GB with my photos, so no danger of running out of space.

I already have two external hard drives that I use for photo and video backup and I transfer my photos to them after each trip. However since they now have a few year’s worth of photos on them, I’m very reluctant to take these away from home, for fear of losing all my photos. Instead it’s better to have a third hard drive like the WD My Passport that I can take on trips as a backup and then clear down afterwards. WD also offer a My Cloud personal storage unit which you keep at home and back up everything there automatically, which would be another great option as my photo collection gets bigger and bigger.

While I was on my cruise I would transfer photos from my iPhone onto my Macbook laptop and from there onto the My Passport hard drive. That way, if either my laptop or my phone was lost or damaged, I’d still have a copy of the photos. When I got home I uploaded the best photos to my Flickr album – see them here – and moved the photos to the hard drives I keep at home, then cleared the My Passport for my next trip. It may seem a bit of work but 30 mins every couple of days is far better than the risk of losing my photos.

Of course if you’re just taking photos for your own interest, and don’t travel with a laptop like I do, it’s still a great idea to have an external hard drive like the My Passport to back up your photos after you get home. The Security features mean that if I was storing anything confidential on the My Passport I could also password protect the drive. There’s also an option to use the hard drive for automatic backup of everything that’s on your laptop, although I’m not using it for this.

Since I reviewed the WD My Passport, they have also updated the design with a range of fresh new colours.