In “How to Keep your Digital Photographs Safe“, productivity blog Lifehacker points out an article that outlines a few quick tips for protecting your snaps. The article primarily discusses photos taken on the road — protect your holiday snapshots by using multiple memory cards, and backing up all along the trip.
Once your photos make it onto your computer, you should have a solid backup system in place to make sure they are never lost. Do you simply save all your digital photos to a “Pictures” folder? What would happen if your computer crashed? Hard drives die a lot more often than you may think.
There are many different ways to set up a back-up routine that will protect your digital photos. This article describes one such system that I have been using for a while.
The Big Idea
Never trust your photos to one computer, and never trust your photos to one physical location. If your hard drive dies, you should be able to recover everything from an external drive. If your computer room floods, you should be able to recover everthing from off-site storage. What follows are the details of one such backup system that satisfies these basic requirements.
Use more than one memory card
Memory cards can fail; if a memory card dies, you may lose all its photos. Instead of carrying one 8 gigabyte card, carry four 2 gigabyte cards. If one fails, only a quarter of your photos will be affected by the failure.
Download sooner rather than later
Never leave your photos sitting on the memory card for an extended period of time. Every day that your photos stay on your camera is another day that your memory card may become corrupted. You want your photos downloaded to a computer and duplicated for security as soon as possible.
Backup, backup, backup
Your computer should routinely backup all of your data to an external hard drive. If you have Mac OS X Leopard, you can use Time Machine to take care of backups. Windows users should check out this backup tutorial.
Create an off-site backup routine
So you have your computer backed up to an external drive… great. But, what happens if your ceiling leaks on your computer desk and destroys all your high tech stuff? If your backups are also kept off-site, you do not have to worry. Two methods of creating off-site backups are burning optical media and using online storage.
As you collect photos, burn them to an optical disc such as a recordable CD or DVD. Split them up logically, such as one disc per year, quarter, month, etc… Keep the discs at a family member’s house, or better, in your safe deposit box. Remember that recordable discs do not last forever though — every couple of years, you should test your discs to make sure they are still readable. If the are not, it is time to re-burn the old ones.
You can also utilize online storage to create an off-site backup system. One of the easiest ways to do this is to purchase a pro account from Flickr. $25 per year will get you unlimited storage, so you can utilize their desktop bulk uploading software to store all your photos with their service. Flickr is a photo sharing site, but they also have privacy options that can be used to keep family snapshots from the public eye.
Get to it
Now that you know how to back up your photos, and why it is a good idea, you have no excuse! If your photos are simply kept haphazard in a few folders on your computer, that should make you feel quite uneasy. Go do something about it!
