Have you ever lost a photo or a set of travel photos? The horrors, right? Imagine taking a vacation somewhere nice and not having any souvenir of it at all. Imagine being excited to post your child’s first-birthday photos on social media only to realize the drive has been corrupted. You’ve just lost a whole bunch of photos of an event that will never happen again. You’re not alone in this nightmare. Even professional photographers lose files because of fires, water damage, and drive corruption.
You should seriously consider an online picture storage account. Every material thing in this world is replaceable. Thanks to insurance policies, you can replace a car, a house, furniture, a computer, and a mobile phone. The bank can provide you with your financial records. The government can issue a new passport to you. Everything can be rebuilt except for one: your photos.
The worst thing about losing photos is realizing that you could have done something to save them. If only you have backed up those files. If only you have made duplicate copies of those files. There are too many “if only” scenarios when you lose your photos. It’s a scary prospect, and if you don’t want it to happen again, take these tips to heart:
Create Local Backups
The word backup is often a misunderstood one. When you sync your photos from your iPhone to your iCloud account, that is not backup. You’re creating copies in another location, but both files are connected. This means that when you delete the photos on your phone, they will also be removed from your iCloud account.
True backups involve copying the files and transferring them to another location. The files shouldn’t be linked to the location of the original files. A real standalone backup will not delete the files you have stored there when the original files are gone from your phone. You should still be able to access a copy of these files. That’s what true backing up means.
That being said, what you need to do is to create local backups. After you have downloaded the photos from your flashcards or phones to your computer, immediately burn them on a DVD. Keep this DVD in a safe place.
Next, transfer the photos to an external hard drive. You should keep this external hard drive outside your home or business. You don’t want all your backups to be in the same place. What happens if there’s afire or water damage? All your backups will be gone as well.
If you really care about keeping your photos safe, you should also subscribe to an online archiving service. They will keep your photos in separate servers so that your files will be safe no matter what happens. The service is not for free, but it will provide your photos with an extra level of protection.
Finally, you can opt to go the standard route of printing important photos. Choose the photos you want to print, though. You shouldn’t print every single selfie. Pick the ones that you want to keep. You can even make a scrapbook out of them.
Never risk losing your photos again. There are plenty of ways to make sure that this will never happen to you and your precious photos. Investing in these backup systems may add to your expenses, but if they’re keeping these mementos safe, then that’s well worth the money.
