There are several different ways to backup your precious digital photos, some easier, some more expensive. In my last article I discussed the fact that in the digital age it’s very easy to collect thousands of files and how to cut those numbers down by choosing wisely and yes actually deleting some files, be strong! So after going through everything you still have several gigabytes of files on a single hard drive, this is not a good situation to find yourself or your precious photos of the baby with a Cheerio up his nose!

The sad fact is that technology fails, it’s not a question of “if” it will fail but question of when, so you MUST backup your files; possibly in several different ways! Long ago when I was in 6th grade our house burned down, every photograph my parent’s had ever taken of us was gone, we were able to collect a few from relatives but I have only one or two actual baby pictures of myself. When our family evacuated for Katrina I was anal about what to bring, every photograph, external hard drive, and video of my wedding and my children was in the car……..who cares about expensive electronics, insurance covers that but nothing will get those lovely Cheerio up the nose pictures of my baby back!

This is your personal wake up call, you MUST back up those files and you SHOULD do it in more than one way. We will start simple, CDs and DVDs. I recommend that you use DVD-R, these can be written to sequentially like a tape, DVDs have a longer lifespan than CDs and can hold more data, they are more expensive of course. Just keep in mind that DVDs DO have a shelf life, eventually they WILL go fail. If you only backup to DVDs there will come a day when you will not be able to retrieve your data, keep this in mind if you have hope of one day showing your grandchildren pictures of their mother sticking that Cheerio up her nose! My advice is to ALWAYS have a backup for your backup!

Your backup to your backup could be a second drive on your computer or what I recommend is an external hard drive. The beauty of an external is that not only is it separate from your main system but you can unplug it and take it with you during those annoying evacuations from whatever kind of disaster hits your part of the world. In the big scheme of things external hard drives have gotten relatively cheap, you can get a 1TB (terabyte=1000 gigabytes) for around $200 according to type and model of course. I know you’re thinking, “I don’t need that much storage” but who knows you might suddenly find your gifted in photography and start taking pictures like mad!

The two options I choose to backup my family and professional photos is an external RAID hard drive and on-line storage. A RAID is an external drive that has two or more hard drives inside and one actually mirrors another. If one of the hard drives should crash or fail you have an exact copy on the second hard drive, replace the failed drive and it will once again mirror itself and you’re off and running. I highly recommend the Western Digital 1TB My Book Mirror Edition, it has two 500 gigabyte hard drives, and is under $200. There are many on-line storage options out there my two favorites are Carbonite and UpLine, I prefer these two b/c there is a set yearly fee instead of a per gigabyte fee, Carbonite is $50 per year and UpLine is $60 per year. The great thing about these two options is that it’s unlimited storage, you can backup your entire computer and if it crashes or there is a fire, flood etc you can put all your information on a new computer and you’re up and running again.

Both of these sites have software that constantly backs up your computer, when you’re online. The things to know are 1)if you take something off your computer the program will eventually (in about a month) also delete it from your online storage and 2)if you want to backup an external hard drive you have to be sure that it’s a dedicated drive recognized by your computer and that you manually add it to the backup software. Your external hard drive also MUST be on while you are online so that the program will check it and back it up, if it doesn’t see the external it might assume you have deleted that information and delete it from your online storage. In my opinion online storage really is the cheapest, easiest and safest way to go. Hard drives crash, DVDs go bad, fire, flood and other natural disasters can ruin your entire computer but online storage will always be there when you need it. The negative is that it takes a long time to get set up, think of trying to upload every single file on your computer……..it’s going to take a while but then you’re done and you’re safe!

There is one more great little storage tool that I just could not live without, it’s called a Portable Multimedia Storage Player (PMSP) these little gems are absolutely wonderful for travel.  It’s exactly what the name says, you can upload music, videos and photos from your computer or any other type of media storage such as a memory cards.  When I traveled I always brought my laptop because I knew I would have to upload my memory cards during the trip, but no more, now I uplaod everything to my PMSP.  Not only can you upload everything but you can view your photos and decide on keepers right then and there.  It’s also great for the kids to watch movies on in the car or on the plane!

So don’t forget, backup, backup, backup………so there will be no crying when your technology fails……..which it WILL eventually!!

~April