Back-Up Your Treasured Memories

In this digital generation we take more photos than ever, but very few people actually make real prints anymore. Prints are still one of the best ways to view your images and have them last, if you use archival print materials.

There are two types of people who take digital photos; those who have had a hard drive crash and those waiting to have one. Since the advent of digital photography, there is a great temptation to just keep on shooting, amassing gigabytes and even terabytes of data. But it’s very important to save and back up your images properly – unless you don’t care if you lose them.

With the capacity of memory cards continually growing and prices coming down, many people leave images on the card in their camera for months. One guy I know left his camera in a taxi in Bangkok and was never able to get back all those precious holiday snaps. Storage cards can also become corrupted and if that happens your precious images are gone.  You really want to avoid that sickening feeling when you realise you have just lost or deleted treasured memories.

Will the storage method you are using even be around in 30 years? Will your frozen moments be lost in digital transition? When your loved ones want to review your life’s adventures, will your history be lost in some ancient storage system?

CD and DVD are common digital archiving methods for many people. But even if they can be read in 20 years, will your information still be intact? Normal quality CDs and DVDs will most likely suffer disc rot before this time, making them unreadable.

A good way to back up digital information is to a high quality raided back up disc, which has two drives in a single unit and makes two copies of your information. If there is a problem with one drive, everything will still be on the other drive.

Maybe this photo tip is your personal reminder to properly back-up your treasured memories and not let procrastination catch up with yo.