Backing up your images

As 2013 comes to an end I always love looking back at all the pictures I took of Evan and our family, trips, outings and just random fun times.  I always look forward to putting all of our favorite pictures into an album and we have one from each vacation we have taken, special events like Evan’s birthday parties and then of course the big album of each year.  There is something so special about flipping the pages of an album looking at each image as they tell a story, much different than flipping through them on the computer.  I cherish each and every album we have (and we do have a lot!), I couldn’t imagine losing any of the pictures I have over the last 33 years of my life, I would be beyond devastated.  We live in such a digital world that we take so many pictures with our phones and digital cameras, load them onto our computer and that’s it, never printing those precious memories and just assuming the pictures will be on our computers forever.  But recently I had a friend AND a photographer acquaintance go through the heartbreak of losing all their personal pictures and learning the hard way how important it is to back up your images.  I am a bit overly paranoid about losing my images, which I don’t necessarily think is a bad thing, so I have all of my personal and client’s images backed up as 3 complete copies and 3 different locations: an external hard drive, a disaster proof hard drive and online.  Again, I am overly paranoid about losing my images and would rather be safe than sorry, plus I have about 2 TB of pictures to store including my own personal photos and client sessions and weddings but having at least 2 copies of your images in 2 separate locations is a must!  Backing up your images to a CD isn’t the best way to go either, CD’s only have a shelf life of up to 5 years and sometimes less so it’s actually better to back up to either a flash drive or even better an external hard drive.  And when we leave the house for an extended period of time, I always put my hard drives into our fireproof safe because you just never know what could happen.  As I mentioned earlier, one of my hard drives is disaster proof and that gives me the most piece of mind.  I bought it from a local company out of Auburn, CA called ioSafe whom specializes in keeping your pictures and documents safe from flood and fire.  Some online storage options I recommend are iCloud to backup your phone pictures, Dropbox to store and share your images or Carbonite.

So don’t put it off anymore, back up those images and also print those pictures for either your wall and/or in an album to ensure that you will have them forever!  If you’re not into scrapbooking and prefer creating your album digitally, I highly recommend checking out Mpix’s photo books where you can easily and inexpensively create yearbook style hard or soft cover books.  I guarantee that if you create an album that you can leave on a coffee table or on a shelf you will look at your pictures more than if they were just stuck on your computer, and you can easily show them off to your friends and family.