Speaking of saving pics.
Maybe three years ago at work we got hit by a jpg ransom malware. Got past multiple software and hardware firewalls.
We are an 50 person engineering firm, and we end up taking LOTS of pics on jobsites. I had probably 100-300 photos on each of my 20+ current projects. It encrypted a goodly quantity of our jpgs before IT could intervene; and the bastards wanted $5000 to restore them.
Management told them to go F themselves. To this day (well, last week), I still have long-standing projects where I need a pic of something I knew I took. Gone.
If you are going to save pics on a hard drive - also keep a couple multiple hard drives off line to avoid a ransomware hit. And with THAT said, hard drives are a DYNAMIC mechanical media, relying upon a sealed enclosure containing stacked metallic platters spinning really fast with a reading head floating about 10 nanometers above the surface. What's a nanometer, you say? A human hair is about 75,000 nanometers. The relationship to a human hair and a nanometer is about the same as a mile is to an inch. Yet if that head touches the surface... its all over. The salient point is that at some time IT WILL FAIL.
For stuff that you cannot re-create (like your album collection that you transferred to CD and then made to MP3, with the albums disappearing a long time ago) $200 will get you a Blu-Ray writer and a stack of 50GB (yes, 50GB!) discs. Add in a $100 Blu-Ray burner program, burn your data to the static media, and it will last as long as there is equipment to read it. In theory...
But way longer than a hard drive.