Backing-up Digital Photos & Back-up Approach: Tips to Consider

Almost everybody is using digital cameras or phone cameras to take photographs and create priceless digital photo memories. However, do you back-up? I wanted to outline some approaches for backing up digital photos and what to do if you were not able to back-up. Why back-up? From power surge, to user error, to a virus attack can wipe out your files. When it does happen, you do not want to lose years of precious photos. It is always better to be cautious rather than taking risks with digital photographs. Backing up your precious digital photographs can save you a lot of heartaches. Now that we have agreed that you need to back, what are the different back-up approaches? There are many and I have boiled them down to the top six approaches:

Back-up Approach 1: Save that Memory Card Simple to execute. When your digital photo memory card is full, just buy a new memory card and save the old one. With memory card prices declining, this approach is easy to execute. Remember to label the memory card and store it in a cool place where you can find the card. Be sure to have no magnetic device(s) near the memory card as magnetic devices can erase or corrupt the memory card. I would also recommend keeping an additional back-up of the memory card as memory cards are known to die from time to time.

Back-up Approach 2: Back-up on Your Computer This may be the most logical option but potentially not the best. Most people download their digital photographs to their computer and use their computer as the storage device. If you do so, then be sure that you are not worried about the storage memory capacity of your computer. If you are, then you should consider some of the other back-up approaches. Also, if your computer is regularly backed up using automatic back-up software, storing pictures on your computer may slow the performance and increase the time for periodic back-ups.

Back-up Approach 3: Back-up on CD or DVD This is a very labor intensive approach. Also, if the CD or DVD gets scratched, you could lose all or most photographs on that storage device.

Back-up Approach 4: Back-up on an External Hard Drive Increasingly people are dedicating an external hard drive for storing their digital photos or assigning a portion of their external hard drive for storing digital photos. Hard drives are getting cheaper and this could be a very good approach to storing digital photos.

Back-up Approach 5: Back-up at Back-up Site on the Web The value of this approach is that you can get to your photograph from anywhere. Also, as the web-site storage location would be a remote location from you computer or digital camera, you are protected from theft and other hazards such as fire. There are a number of back-up sites on the web for example Carbonite and Barracuda Networks. We have not done an analysis to recommend one but it should be easy to find such analysis. The draw backs to this approach are (a) you pay a recurring cost though solutions such as Carbonite start from $55 per year (b) downloading lost picture can take time and (c) you are dependent on a third party though this could be an asset (not a drawback) as the back-up provider can help to recover the photographs.

Back-up Approach 6: Back-up on Facebook or Orkut Potentially a cost effective approach to Back-up Approach 5 and can provide the additional benefit of being able to share these photographs with other people Other Points to Consider While creating a backup plan, you should look for software that will either routinely backup your data, or schedule a backup to run at a precise time. Using such automatic backup software will remind you to periodically save your files. Some of the prime back-up programs are Dantz's Retrospect Professional and Stomp's Backup MyPC. These programs can handle a wide range of devices including DVD drives. If you did not back-up or if back-up was not done correctly and you think that you have lost your data, fear not as there are photo recovery software that can recover digital photos from corrupted or unusable media and storage devices. Read my Photo Recover Software Review article written a few months back to get reviews on several leading photo recovery software.

In this article, I recommended Digital Assembly's Adroit Photo Recovery software over other software. One of the reasons was the ability of Adroit Photo Recovery to recover more pictures using a technique called SmartCarving. SmartCarving allowed the user to recover fragmented photos. Other applications did not recover fragmented photos.

More details about Digital Assembly's Adroit Photo Recovery solution can be found at their site