Happy New Year! Let’s find peace with our photos this year.
January Tip – Prepare for the Year
There are a few simple things you can do right now to set yourself up for an easier year managing your photos:
- Set your date and time stamp – check your devices and make sure the date and time are set correctly. Digital images embed this information and make it very easy to use when organizing your photos. Make sure you are recording the correct information.
- Write down the process for downloading and organizing your photos. The more routine and consistent this process is, the easier and less time consuming the task becomes.
- Set a schedule to download and organize your photos. Put an appointment on your calendar every month to complete this task. Write these appointments on your calendar now.
- Check your back up systems. This step is so important it is the body of our Newsletter this month! See all the details below.
Check Your Back Up Systems
Set an appointment every six months to make sure your back up plans are working.
1. Can you access your back up copies and does everything look the way you expect it to?
2. Are you following your back up plan as you intended?
3. Are your back up plans meeting your needs?
4. Has anything changed?
We upgrade our computers, online sites change, DVDs degrade or get lost, computers crash, and new products come on the market. Make sure you are protecting your precious memories, and all your hard work organizing them, in a way that keeps your photos safe.
It is recommended you follow the 3-2-1 Method of backing up your digital photos – keep 3 copies of your entire photo collection, stored on 2 different types of media or devices, with 1 copy stored in a different physical location. What would this look like? Perhaps you will keep one copy on your computer’s hard drive, one copy on an external hard drive and one copy in a cloud-based storage site.
It is also best if you can automate some of the process – select an automated backup of your computer that you can set and forget (for 6 months – until you check it!). I use Carbonite to run an automatic back up of our entire computer. When my computer crashes (and it will!) I’ll have a full back up copy of the contents.
Setting your phone to sync with iCloud, Drobox or Google Photos automates the back up of the photos on your phone. Just be careful when syncing – if you delete the photo on your phone it will also be deleted from your back up. For this reason, I hesitate to call a collection that syncs an actual back up. Mistakes happen. Try to make your back up copies as secure as possible. While I back up my phone to iCloud, I consider this a temporary back up until I can download my pictures and save them to my permanent back up copies.
The more automated, scheduled and routine your back up processes become, the more likely your photo collection will remain complete, organized and up to date. Update your back up processes. Check they are working and put an appointment 6 months out on your calendar to check again. Now you won’t have to worry about your photos for the rest of the year!