I thought this would be simple but External Portable Drives, External Desktop drives, Network Drives, Solid State, Cloud ….eh? I just want a box which I can plug into the my laptop and drag all my files and photos to for storage. Can anyone recommend something? Thanks.

You need Two things:

Wd 1tb passport drive to drag stuff to.
Subscription to bitcasa to back it all up.

You can get a Western Digital 2Tb desktop with remote access for approx £150, and there’s Backblaze for offsite data backup, for around $5/month.

Storage or backup?

If all you want is storage then a big external drive and windows backup will do it, drag/drop also available.

Next step up is a network drive – no need for plugging it in every time as it’s there when you are on your network.

Separate tech is cloud storage – Dropbox/google drive etc. none of the free ones will allow you enough space for a decent pic collection I pay some extra to Google for a lot of photo storage via picassa. The folder is automatically synced when it runs. Same can be done with Dropbox.

To have a backup then the 2nd copy needs to be in a different physical location to the original.

My personal preference would be Network storage so that stuff is accessible to everyone in the house (music/vids/pics) with cloud storage for backup.