So you’ve got your digital camera and you’ve shot a ton of pictures of everything from the kitchen sink to that pulitzer photo. But now your hard drive has failed and your wondering if that computer guy next door can fix it or at least get your images off the drive so you don’t loose them all. Luckily this has not happened to you today (we hope) and you’ve got options for keeping your images safe. You have options for how you back up so read on to find out what is the best option for you.
Where to start, where to start, there are so many things that you can prepare for when thinking of backing up your photos.
- How Many Copies of Your Photos is Truly safe?
- Should you put all your files in one location?
- What about the “Cloud” I keep hearing about?
## How Many Copies should you have on hand?
This is one of those big questions out there and you’ll get many many different responses from everyone you ask. I think this is one of those instances where more is better, the more locations you have the better off you will be. That is not monetarily possible for most people so what I would recommend is that you have three locations where you store your images in some fashion or another.
## Should I put all files in one location?
When I say location I mean physical location, and this is where we plan for natural disasters. What would happen to you today if you your house burnt down? Last thing your thinking of is the photos you took last year and your right, get them in more then one spot and you won’t have to. The easiest way to do this to to have multiple hard drives and store one at the office and one at the house. Make a point of taking the office HD back and forth every week to month.
## What is this “Cloud” I keep hearing about?
Cloud storage is a very cool concept and could be a big part of your storage options when used correctly. Cloud storage is a way for you to upload your entire photo collection to a group of servers somewhere that are backed up and managed by professionals. There are limitations to this wonder technology, first and foremost is the internet speed when you upload from your computer to theirs is usually pretty slow. It may take you weeks to upload your whole library to their servers the first time, it should be much faster after each shoot. Lot’s of these companies have tried to make the initial upload faster for you by offering to send you a hard drive in the mail and then mail it back to them. They will load all your files onto the servers and then you just have to keep everything up to date. I’m planning a follow up article on cloud based storage in the next few months so if your interested please check back or subscribe to the RSS feed above.
Photos Courtesy Of – TechniquesWithTodd.com And ViaGallery
