Organizing and Backing Up Photos
Over the years one accumulates tons of pictures. Now we are fortunate enough to have digital cameras. We can minimize the physical clutter but are left with tons of digital pictures. If they are not sorted it can be a mess to organize. If they aren’t backed up they can be lost forever when you computer or hard drive crashes. In the past, printed pictures were only lost in the event of a disaster (flood, fire, etc). The risk was much lower but still existed. Nowadays technology is the biggest risk. Hard drive failures are imminent. It’s just a matter of time. If you don’t have a backup you will get burnt.
In order to minimize the risk of losing printed pictures you need to create a backup. You can make physical copies of them or you can scan them to a digital format. Both options require a lot of time if you choose to do it yourself which is why people don’t normally do it. Recently I have purchased a high speed scanner that makes the scanning process faster. If you are interested in getting some pictures scanned to DVD let me know. Once your pictures are on DVD you can easily make a copy of them and store them offsite. You can keep a copy at your house and one at your friends house.
If all of your pictures are digital you can back them up to CD/DVD or USB hard drive. The key thing with backing up your pictures is you need to have your backup offsite. If your house is burning, the backup that is on your USB drive won’t do you any good if it’s connected to your computer. To do this you can burn pictures to CD/DVD every couple of months and store them at a friends house. If you are backing up to a USB hard drive it’s easier to use two drives. What I do is keep a hard drive offsite with all my pictures. I keep a drive at home and keep adding new pictures to it. After about a month I bring the other hard drive back home and sync both off them to make sure they all have the same pictures. If my house was to burn down I would only lose the new pictures since my last sync.
Another option is having a backup online on sites like Flickr. What I like about Flickr is it’s cheap. I paid $25 for the year and it gives me unlimited photo storage. If you don’t want to pay, you can opt for the free option which allows you to see your most recent 200 pictures even though all of your pictures are still stored on the site. The other nice thing about flickr is it stores the original picture (not like facebook which resizes it). I use flickr to upload my important pictures (like weddings). That way I have a local copy, a copy on USB hard drive and a copy online.
At any rate, your pictures are worth backing up. If you don’t have a backup of your pictures I would strongly recomment adopting one of the methods above because when distaster strikes it will be too late.
Recent Comments