We love over the top megapixel, high definition images.
And we are not alone! A quick visit to Flickr reaffirms that millions of photography lovers (be they professional or amateur) take hundreds of millions of digital photos. The majority of people never realize how important it is to backup or copy their digital photos to another location such as an external hard drive, the cloud, flickr or picasa until they are on the brink of disaster.
Every day we trust our digital memories to our computers without a second thought. Generally speaking, this means to one location, one hard drive on a single laptop or workstation...and this is bad news waiting to happen. Computers and hard drives are subject to data loss, whether from accidental deletion, mechanical failure, computer virus of natural disaster; all hard drives are susceptible.
Never fear, there are options, there are choices for you the photography lover and below are 5 EASY WAYS to backup your photos.
1) Copy your pictures to an external hard drive. Remember to "copy" not just move your photos to another drive. You want your files in at least two locations.
2) Upload your photos to flickr. Flickr is more than just a photo sharing website, it's a place to remotely store your digital photos and video for access on any device with an internet connection. You can keep all those photos private if you choose.
3) NAS - for those unfamiliar with network storage, these are external storage devices with hard drives inside. Rather than attaching directly to your computer or laptop, these devices allow you to connect multiple computers and even mobile devices for backing up photos, documents and video.
3) RAID - Redundant Array of Independent Disks is tech speak for multiple hard drives, that are backup copies or share the copied data. RAID is important for many reasons, most importantly that your data is in more than one location and can be automated to make backup copies.
4) Cloud Storage - Whether you think of Mozy, DropBox, Carbonite or Amazon S3, cloud storage means that you save your data to an off site location. Each of these services has its pros and cons
5) Off Site Backup - take a copy of your data to another location! Whether you choose a portable hard drive, thumb drive or stack of CDs or DVDs this method is great for those that have the time and resources.
Of course there are pros and cons to each of the above methods for backing up your digital photos. What's important is that you start backing up today so you don't lose your precious photos tomorrow.
