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Making Backups of Digital Picture Files

Nicole, over at the scrapbooking blog, did a nice four part series on organizing and storing photos. Her articles had to do with prints of photos. But what do you do if you have digital prints? You can just store them on your computer’s hard drive, right? I mean, I have a 60 GB hard drive. Isn’t that for storing lots of digital pictures?

While it is true that a large hard drive is good for working with photos, it is not the only place that you should save your pictures. Backing up your hard drive is good practice, and backing up important photos is even more important, especially with digital files. “But I have so many picture files, and I don’t have time to copy them to a disc or transfer them to another hard drive”, you might say.

Well, make the time. It doesn’t take long to do, and if you have a regular weekly or monthly back up schedule, it’s a breeze. If you don’t have an external hard drive, most photo processors these days will burn your images onto a CD, from your camera card. This is not expensive, and the CD may be added to as you get more files.

Another option is those small, portable hard drives, called flash drives. These very handy, small drives come in capacities from 32 MB all the way up to 2 GB. The same is true for your flash cards, except you can get a 4 GB flash drive for you camera.

With Windows XP, it is very easy, (if you have a CD burner) to burn your own photos to CD. Actually, most new computers come with CD and DVD burners built-in, so there is no excuse for losing photos. And if you’re really high tech, you can upload photos to the internet using a wireless connection from your remote photo location.

The point is to back up your photos regularly, and also have a copy of your files in a location other than your home, too, in case of fire or other natural disaster. But please, please, please, do not store all your picture files just on your hard drive. It’s a recipe for disaster if something happens to your hard drive. And if you have a Windows operating system, you know something will happen, you just don’t know when.