Welcome to Save Your Photos Month!
September Tip – Be Prepared
The best way to protect your precious photos is to be aware of the risks, assess your options, choose solutions that fit your personal needs and create a plan to ensure you keep them safe. Do it now, before disaster strikes. You’ll be glad you were prepared!
Create a Backup Plan
The single most important thing you can do to protect your photo collection is to back it up. Your digital photos are at more risk than your printed photos and should be addressed first. 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.
An external hard drive (EHD) can be purchased at Staples or Best Buy for less than $100. They have a life expectancy of around 5 years. When you purchase a new EHD stick a label on it with the month and year it was purchased – now you will know when it is time to replace it.
A cloud-based storage site is an excellent choice for a second backup copy of your photos. Please don’t consider it your primary (or only!) backup. When you use these sites, you are entrusting your photos to these companies – and you then become subject to the way these companies treat your photos. Some change the size of your photos and only keep low resolution copies. Some don’t keep the metadata attached to your photos. Some allow syncing with your mobile devices (which can easily lead to accidentally deleting your photos on ALL your devices!) Do a little research to see which site is best for you.
Check out the following cloud-based storage sites specifically for your photo collection:
SmugMug
Forever
Flickr
Google Photos
iCloud
Amazon Prime Photo
Also look at these cloud-based storage sites which will back up other files on your computer as well as your photos:
Backblaze
Carbonite
iDrive
SOS Online
Dropbox
Here is my personal backup plan:
- I keep the primary copy of our digital photos and videos in a digital photo hub file on the hard drive of my desktop computer.
- We use Carbonite to run a backup copy of all the documents and photos on our desktop computer. It automatically updates as files are changed. This is my first cloud-based backup.
- I manually update a copy of my digital photo hub that I keep in Dropbox as I make changes to the digital photo hub on my computer. This is my second cloud-based backup.
- I make the same changes to the copy of my digital photo hub I keep in SmugMug. This is my third cloud-based backup.
- I have an EHD that I attach at the beginning of each month and copy over my digital photo hub. I do this as part of the process of organizing my pictures.
- I plug in another EHD every few months to make a full backup copy of the files on our computer.
- I create an annual photobook for our family (this is a printed copy of our best photos)
I use a mix of manual and automatic backups and I keep to a schedule so I know when my last backup copies were made. I didn’t even blink the summer our computer hard drive was completely wiped. Or when my phone suddenly stopped working and had to be replaced last spring. Or when Marko’s phone was stolen in Russia (though we did lose a few pictures he hadn’t uploaded yet). Or when we quickly evacuated the house when the construction company hit a gas line across the street. It happens! And we will not have to panic when our computer crashes again. ?
Create your own backup plan. Write it down and establish a schedule for downloading your photos and backing them up. Include a mix of automatic and manual backups. Investing a small amount of time each month is well worth avoiding the panic and loss when your computer eventually crashes. Please contact us if you would like help setting up your backup plan!