What would you do if the computer on which you store all your photos crashed? Would you lose all your precious photos, or would your memories be safe?
Digital cameras make is easy for us to take and save hundreds of pictures on our computers. Unfortunately as many of us know from experience, computers can crash, be stolen, or destroyed, and with it all your photos.
There are steps you can take to save your memories.
1. Easily store and organize your photos are with on-line services like Snapfish and Flickr.
These services allow you to upload an unlimited number of pictures for a small annual fee. These sites also make ordering prints a breeze and sharing your photos as simple as sending a link.
They also have programs that offer some basic editing tools. Flickr's editing site Picnik is a super easy and fun site where you can do all sorts of fun edits to your photos.
These online sites allow you to save your pictures somewhere other than your personal computer.
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Like computers, websites do not always live forever so you should also have one more back up of your photos. The easiest way to do this? >>>
2. Save your picture files onto a writable CD.
You can fit quite a lot of pictures on one CD. These CDs can be saved in one notebook with each CD labeled. This makes it easy in an emergency to grab just a folder.
You can even save the folder somewhere outside of the house, like a relative's home or your office. Even CD's aren't the perfect solution and should be checked to make sure they still work every year or so.
By having your photos in 3 different places you have less of a risk of losing that precious photo of your kid's first day of school, or your favorite wedding picture.
So remember to back up your back up!
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Elissa (aka Punk Rock Mom) is a blogger, wife, mother, knitter, photographer, HR Director, a Scorpio and all around cool person. You can follow the adventures of Punk Rock Dad, Punk Rock Mom and The Phi at Punk Rock Parents
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Another great idea is a thumb drive, sometimes referred to as a USB drive. They range in price from $15 up to $150 depending on the size and brand. Sams Club has an 8GB drive for $39 or thereabouts. These can be plugged into any computer with a USB port, which most computers have multiples of these days, many times on the face of the hard drive tower. So not only are they great for backup storage, but they're excellent for portable pictures if you want to show them to family members or any other reason you'd want to have pictures with you. They're not just limited to photo files either, so important documents like resumes or that great American novel can be saved to them as well.
You didn't point out a key feature of flickr! With flickr, you are able to get your photos back. With Snapfish, all you can do is print – not recover your original files.
Great post! Great reminder! I use a portable hard drive and LOVE it. I back up my photos, once each week onto it, then take it and store it at work.
I am sleeping better at night these days because of it. 
I use a hard drive too. It holds something like 15,000 photos or songs. I leave it connected to the computer though because it's a pain to reach and plug in and I access it several times daily. That does bother me and I often wonder if my computer were to fry if it would go right along with it.
I'm always dancing with danger.
What are your thoughts on saving photo's onto portable flash drives and then putting all the flashdrives onto a keychain to grab in an emergency?
Might be more expensive, but I would think that while disks can get scratched, this may be a better long term solution.
Just thinking out loud here. What do you think? This has been a long term project of mine – backing up the photo's. Thus, the topic is on my mind!
flash drives are a great idea! I didn't realize they came with sooo much memory. What I like best about my cd's is that I can keep then in sleeves in one folder but the keychain idea is awesome.