Don’t Be A Loser … Backup Your Photos and Data
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
Sweetie!?! The personal is making a strange clicking sound.
What’s that smell? Is something burning?
Weren’t all your digital photos on that computer?
Oh, no!
Don’t be a loser … like me. I am talking about loss, data loss. In terms of digital photography I’m speaking specifically about the pictures of your life that are more than likely all stored in one place only: the hard drive of your computer.
Wedding photos, vacation photos, birthdays, holidays; these precious moments of your life can be lost in an instant from a bolt of lightning or the spark of static electricity you might pick up from rubbing your feet across the carpet. Machines are imperfect and do fail, and by Murphy’s Law, they will fail at the worst possible time.
If you experience a hard drive failure it could cost between $300 and $3000 to recover the data depending on the severity of the hard drive crash, and this service isn’t guaranteed. The data could be lost permanently anyway. What dollar value do you place on your digital photo archive?
Here’s a short list of things you can do to protect your valuable photos, videos and other personal data:
Buy and Keep Your Antivirus Software Up To Date
Malicious viruses can erase your hard drive. Use a system that’s updated automatically each day with the latest virus definitions.
Keep Your Personal computer Serviced
When dust collects in and around your hard drives, they overheat and that’ll shorten the life of the drive. Your PC is one big electrostatic air filter. Have it serviced by a professional at least once a year and keep them off of the carpeted floor, away from dust and pet dander.
I advocate getting an air filter and keep it in the room with your PC. Your Computer won’t breathe in as much dust, and as an added benefit, the air will be fresher and you’ll breathe less dust at the same time.
Backup Your Photos and Data
Backing up your pics and data over the internet is becoming a very popular choice for data backup. This was formerly a pretty high-priced solution for the convenience, but with the lowering cost and expanding capacity of hard drives, many web based services are popping up.On the internet backup is like buying an insurance policy for your digital pic archives.
Here are the advantages of backing up to the Internet:
You can backup securely over any high speed World wide web connection.
Since your data is stored on a server offsite, you are covered from events such as Computer theft, fire or hard drive failure. You might think about what would happen if there is an earthquake, flood or other natural disaster wherever your backups are stored.
Mozy.com is the on the web backup system that I use. Suggested by PC World Magazine, it works equally well on Personal computer and Mac. You can back up to 2 Gigabytes for free and you can backup unlimited data from your home computer for only $4.95 per month (even less with an annual subscription). They have a pro version as well for your office computer.
Many on the internet backup companies offer a low cost data backup only to charge you on the back side to restore your backup data. Not so with Mozy. They have no hidden charges! When I asked their tech support to confirm, they told me “We don’t hold your data for ransom.”
Don’t be a loser. Take your digital photo library seriously, save early and save often, and make data backup a critical part of your digital photography processes. One day (maybe even tomorrow) you’ll be glad you did, or sorry you didn’t.
You might even encourage your friends to back up their data (send them a link to this article!) You may become one of their biggest heroes the next time they experience a data loss event.
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October 15th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
I lost a 500GB hard drive full of all my Digital photography, all of my best images, I lost 10 years worth of family photo’s stuff from back when I was 16 years old.. all now gone. I was moving drives around and hooked up two drives to an onboard raid controller by mistake and the drive on board one overwrote to the drive on port two. that being the drive that had all of my images on it. It was such an upsetting experience. I’ll never do that again.
Thanks
Joel