When it comes to memories, few might be more precious than the photos we take of family, friends and pets, of firsts and lasts, of special occasions and daily selfies, of vacation landscapes and neighborhood sunsets. Our life in pictures is sacred. We know this from our own experience, and from you sharing yours via our photo contests. Judging for 2016 is underway.

So how do we preserve our many digital memories? This being January, the start of a new year, new rituals and a time for getting to all those tasks that have been nagging at us for a while, like organizing and storing photos, we thought we would weigh in with some suggestions.

There are online cataloguing and storage options, of course, ranging from Snapfish to Shutterfly. They’re reasonably secure although they’re not without issue. Albums have disappeared and reappeared. Some sites also require that a certain amount of money be spent or paid to maintain storage. And really, do you need another coffee mug or key chain with your kids’ photos on them?

Mainly though, it’s a matter of trust, and whether you are OK placing strangers in control of your memories. The same is true for storing photos on cloud services, and increasing virtual space can be costly.

CDs and flash drives are something you control, but many users report they’re also easily misplaced or misfiled. A dedicated, external hard drive? Well, that’s a different story. And one we naturally skew toward, and some of our favorite options include the new and lightning fast ToughTech Duo C, ToughTech m3, ToughTech Duo 3SR and the RTX220-3QR.

When choosing an external device, keep in mind the amount of overall storage space you require and data transfer needs necessitated by many megapixels. If you want to store averaged sized images, you can go for 500GB to 1TB of space. Mostly, it boils down to your priorities – portability, speed, storage space, reliability, durability and security. Regardless of preference, CRU has you covered.