Monday, July 02, 2007

How precious are your photos?


I like to backup my photos at the end of each month. when I first started taking photo that meant part filling a CD, now I have my new camera and three 1GB cards plus the 256MB card that came with it. That means I can take pretty much a whole DVD worth of photos at once, so now I usually have closer to a DVD, if not several just to backup one months photos.

Am I being paranoid?

NO being a geologist that takes his computer into the field, and wherever I travel, I know computer and hard drives are not the best place to store your precious digital photos. Sooner rather than later something will happened, maybe a disk crash, maybe a software hiccup, a virus or worm, your computer might be stolen or "someone" just accidentally deleting the whole directory, with a mouse click or two.

BUT
don't just make one copy make TWO and it is strongly recommended that you store one copy at a different location (it doesn't have to be a fire proof bank vault but it should be a secure location, ie maybe not in grandad's shed)

FINALLY there is a big difference between backups and archive

So I think I'll write a few blog post over this month explain all my backup strategies (learned from decades of experience in electronic data collection not just photography)

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