Keeping Your Photos Safe

Keeping Your Photos Safe
Keeping Your Photos Safe

With digital cameras replacing film cameras in a digital age, many do not know how to archive their photos taken with their digital camera. Storing your digital images is more than copying the images from your memory card to your computer. Keeping one copy of your images on your computer is extremely dangerous and many have learned this the hard way when they lose all their photos from a hard drive failure. In this article, you will learn how to properly and safely archive your digital images.

Why is it Important to Backup Images?

Like your keys, you would never keep just one copy. Some day you'll lose it, and it's almost guaranteed that you'll lose your keys at least once in your lifetime. This is the same with your digital images, except

How to Backup Your Photos

Backing up your photos is easy. It is a simple process of copying your images from one location to another. For example, burning a copy of your photos on a CD is considered a backup; but not a very good backup. A good backup should be several copies of your images at different locations. We won't discuss every method of backing up photos, but we'll teach you an excellent system to keep your images safe and accessible.

How to Create and Store Your Backups

There are three places you should have a backup of your images: a copy at home, in a safe place other than home, and one somewhere else in the world. It may sound like a lot of work, but it's really simple. Simply make it part of your workflow. Every time you copy your images from your memory card to your computer, copy them to your external hard drive and FTP server as well.

<hpComputer with RAIDOn your computer

Hard drives have lifespan and they eventually die. Most people only create a copy of their images on a single drive. Eventually the hard drive will die and when it fails, all their data and memories are gone. To prevent this, we recommend for everyone to have a redundant array of drives, also known as RAID, for an automated backup. This is simply using more than one hard drive in your computer to create a carbon copy of the main drive. For example, when you copy your images to a computer with two hard drives set on RAID, the images are being copied to both drives at once instead of on a single drive. In the event that your hard drive fails, you still have another copy of your data from your other hard drive. When purchasing a computer, look for one with RAID and two hard drives and make sure that they are setup on mirror mode or RAID 1 instead of striped or RAID 0.

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2 comments on “Keeping Your Photos Safe”

  1. If more people knew the facts about CDs & DVDs they would be scared to death. Almost everyone even stores those incorrectly, and just handling them with dirty hands can start an image-eating fungus "GROWING" on the discs. Portable hard drives and multiple locations says it best.

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