I recently attended an event where renowned photographer Nick Kelsh shared this very interesting quote. “There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who have had their hard drives crash and have lost everything and those who are going to have their hard drives crash.” Well there might be a third – those who don’t own any computers! But if you are reading this post, you likely don’t fit into the third category!
Think about this. Do you take digital photos? Where are they? If they are not printed, you better not have all your eggs (digital photos) in one basket (hard drive)! You truly need to have those photos copied in more than one location.
There are several options to choose from and to play it really safe you might want to choose more than two of these. I personally know someone that had not only the hard drive on her computer crash, but her external hard drive crashed the same weekend! YIKES!
- Hard drive on your computer – yes, this is better than the memory card in your camera, but this is now your primary location so you should choose at least one other of the following and maybe even two!
- External hard drive – this plugs into your computer and sometimes needs its own power source to run as well. You can read more about this in my very first post. Click here.
- CD’s & DVD’s – these at least do not have any running parts. They may still become corrupt but they are a good 3rd backup location. You should do this with ALL your photos periodically. More will be covered on this in another post.
- Off-site backup services – this usually involves a monthly fee where the service connects to your computer connects to the remote location and backs up everything on your hard drive. Another post to follow.
- Photo sites – some companies that you use to order your digital photos as 4×6 prints will store your photos and allow you to re-download them if you need to for a per photo fee. Be sure that they will allow you to re-download the photo at the original resolution and size that you uploaded if you want to use this as one of your options – often the file will be reduced greatly. More to come.
- Finally, there are software programs that will help and even prompt you that it is time to do a back up of your photos. And the really great software programs back up every time you use the program. And the smart ones know to only do a backup of the new photos or those you changed so it only takes a few minutes as you close the program. If you want to know which software I use, subscribe to my newsletter for more information.
Do you have additional back ups of your digital photos? Which method(s) are you using?
I use three methods, My C drive which has a mirrored back up to the (E drive),
Each month I burn to a DVD all of that month’s photos, and,
I use off site storage via Mozy. This is a very, very affordable online affordable backup that has saved me on two different occasions now!! I highly recommend them.
That’s fantastic Sue. It’s really like an insurance policy, isn’t it? You never think about it until you need it. Good for you. I’ll be sharing more on each back up option in future posts.
Thanks for the reminder! I haven’t backed up my photos in quite a while! I have all mine printed through snapfish so the printed ones are kept there. I also burn my photos to cd (as I remember to do so). I’m thinking it’s time to be more disciplined about backing them up though. I’d hate to lose precious photos!
Absolutely Annette – it would be awful to lose them. So many of us get so busy we don’t think about it. That’s why I’m so happy my software reminds me when it’s time to do a back up every time I open & close it. I’ll be posting more about the ability to get our pictures back from places where we have them printed. I hope more of them will allow their customers to re-download the original resolution of the photos you uploaded, I know some do not. Hope you are doing your back up right now.