Safe Keeping Your Digital Memories

Every advancement in digital technology has two sides. On the one hand, convenience goes up. On the other hand, however, the more convenient a device is, the more complicated its programing and technical makeup, and therefore, the more ways there are for something to go horribly, horribly, wrong. Don’t worry, we get a bit dramatic about digital technology sometimes; we’re sure that your digital camera is in perfect, working order and will stay that way for quite some time.

But the fact remains, that accidents happen, and while a warranty may cover the body or lens damage that your Canon EOS Rebelsuffered at the close of your family vacation, there is damage that may have already been done that will not be covered under that warranty, or even be a possibility to recover – of course, we are referring to all those digital photographs you snapped of your children preforming their first dives into the pool at the resort. While your kids may not be much of swimmers, we’re sure they have some talents that were caught on camera at whichever location your family vacationed, and therefore the fact remains that you lost precious photos.

The worst situation in which to find yourself is one that you could have easily prevented. Sure, you could have remembered to put the digital camera back into its case, and not leave it atop the rental car when you sped out of the Disney World parking lot, but don’t beat yourself up about it, these things happen. What you really should have done is transfer your images on to a travel laptop, or a spare SD Memory Card.

Okay, maybe we don’t have time for all that, so you’ll have to deal with the loss of pictures now and again, but that was just one vacation. What about taking reasonable steps to backup your entire library of vacation snapshots? Yeah, we think that makes sense.

The easiest way to go about organizing and storing new pictures is by getting into the habit of always transferring your image files to your computer when you get home from taking pictures. It may also prove to be convenient if you set your camera preferences to name the files by date, instead of just random numbers. For older files, you can simply look through them to organize them, or perhaps you can run a slide-show, depending on your operating system. We recommend keeping all your files in one folder on your desktop, organized into sub-folders, by date, event, person, or whatever you find easiest. Any way you decide to do it, when the time comes, you can easily copy all of the files from that folder on to your media storage device of choice. Whether it is a CD, a flash drive, external hard drive, or collection of SD cards, keep some sort of system. Form a habit of backing up that data at least once every month or two.

We would, however, recommend that whichever storage method you decide upon, be wary of the possible risks, especially with external hard drives, as they can crash as easily as your computer’s hard drive. CD’s would probably be best, since they can be stored in cases and filed physically in a located unlikely to be plagued with disaster.

Another option would be a file host. Something like a Flickr! account may be very useful for those extra precious digital photos. We wouldn’t recommend storing all of your pictures there, but choose the best ones and throw them on there to keep them safe. The best part is that services like these are completely free and can be kept private from the rest of the world. However, if you are still concerned about privacy issues online, you can very cheaply buy a domain name, have it hosted, and then easily upload to the server that folder we were talking about. If that’s a bit too tech savvy for you, then you can just stick with the CD’s on your shelf – we’re sure they’ll be safe there.

If you love to take digital photos, please visit 42nd Street Photo online for digital capture products.

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