We store photos on our phones, SD cards, USBs, computers, external hard drives, and in the cloud. There are many services that seem to protect us with automatic backup to the “cloud” or to external hard drives. Free “cloud” storage sounds like a great idea but please read the Terms of Service – before trusting those services with your family memories. You do read those long, legal documents before clicking “Accept?” – Right?!!!.
Over the years, we have had several clients come in with hard drive crashes worried about their family photos. In many cases, we have successfully recovered those precious pictures. But sadly there are a few that were not recoverable. One client diligently set up an automatic backup service to protect himself from a hard drive crash. Unfortunately, that did not protect him from the ransomware which locked his computer files and copied those files to his cloud backup replacing his files with the latest version (the locked version). A lesson in multi-generational backup plans.
Once I take the pictures, I want to get them copied off the camera SD card onto my computer. But that’s the next challenge, knowing what I know, I don’t just want to put them on my computer. So I carry a portable hard drive to backup my pictures when we are traveling.
After we get home, I copy those precious pictures to a server which is backed up to an off-site media and stored in a different location. Yes, being in the computer industry makes you paranoid. Unfortunately, I have seen many people lose precious pictures and documents to crashes or corrupted backups. There is never a guarantee.
When I first started taking digital pictures, the external hard drives were not all that large. So I have several of these drives. I still need to sit down and review them, consolidate the files and move them to a single location. Then decide which pictures and documents should be moved to my permanent cloud storage. I take far too many pictures to store all of them in the cloud. We’ll talk about private, permanent cloud storage in a future blog post.
Please share how you manage your backups by posting a comment.
Dedicated to: Our son, James E Watkins, III, 1980 – 2015: Guitarist, Musician, Web and Database Programmer; Intelligent, Creative, Silly, Loving, Strong, a Fighter (battled cancer for 5 years); Not Afraid to Speak His Mind. Known as the Angry Gnome and World’s Greatest Uncle. Never forgotten; forever 34.