Remember those scattered newspaper clippings in your mothers shoe box and those old photo albums of you in the bath tub as an infant?  Those are rapidly declining.  I write this blog this evening because I’m guilty as charged.  I have taken thousands, if not tens of thousands of digital photographs but hardly have any of them to show for it.  Sure I keep the most important shots by printing them as 8×10′s or saving them on an external drive, but out of 5000 I have less than 50 saved.  I can’t get back those memories I captured; camping trips to Iowa and long Saturday nights with friends on the town, all lost.

In the ‘old days’ it was easy to order two sets of 5×7 prints, stash them in a photo album and stick them in the closet.  Now many people opt to share photos online in a digital format and never print out their photographs; the files are scattered all over their hard drive.  This generations memories are being lost forever because of digital carelessness!

There are things everyone can  do so they can secure their data for long-term storage.  The key word you must remember is redundancy.  Having one external hard drive in your home is not a back-up.  While it is better than nothing at all, what happens if you have a house fire?  Both your PC and your hard drive are toast and your stuck with nothing.  Single back-ups to external drives mostly thwart data loss if your hard drive has a sudden crash or you were infected with a nasty virus.

After you have taken a set of photos you’ll want to transfer them to  your computer as soon as possible.  Over long periods of time photos stored on an SD or CF cards can become corrupt and will be unreadable.  I’m not saying run to a computer after every shutter snap, just don’t plan on leaving precious photos on your SD/CF card for weeks at a time.   Once you get them on your computer try and keep them organized.  Name the photo set appropriately and name the folder logically.  Software like Adobe Photoshop Elements is great for importing photos with its intuitive photo tagging and organizational system.

Once imported you’ll have a copy on your computers hard drive, now you’ll want to back-up on another external storage device.  I personally recommend a Networked Storage Device (NSD).   A NSD is a little different from a regular USB 2.0 external hard drive because it connects to your home router rather than your PC directly.  The hard drive is visible on any computer on your network and any user can save files to it just like a normal drive.  These are great for easy long-term storage.

Now you have two copies of your data, one on your hard drive and another on a back-up external drive.  That’s enough?  I don’t think so!  You’ll also want to invest in an online back-up service.  There are many companies offering off-site storage but my personal recommendation is Carbonite.  Carbonite will automatically back-up your files while your computer is idle so it wont slow you down while your using your PC.  You can also force it to back-up.  Carbonite will encrypt your files before transferring them off-site to maintain your security.

Some people suggest storing CD’s at bank deposit boxes, I think that is a real pain unless you have very sensitive files you know you won’t need to access for many many years.

Redundancy is again the keyword to this whole thing.  I think one external and one off-site back-up is quite suitable for most home PC users.  Those with a home-business might require more options in terms of storage.  Don’t let your data go away forever, BACK IT UP!