NEWSLETTER
INSPIRATION
DIGITAL SCRAPBOOKINGTips and Tricks ~ Photo Storage
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Hello everyone!! Aubrey here and I hope this find everyone in a happy holiday mood! This is such a crazy time with all of the events and programs and gift buying and everything else that it is hard sometimes to remember to slow down for a moment and take it all in. I have a hard time with that, but that is why we take lots and lots of pictures so we can go back and smile while remembering the good times we had!
Today I am here with a Tips and Tricks and a bit more of a serious one at that. It has to do with preserving our pictures forever without risk of losing them. I am actually writing this because of a very recent and painful experience. Several years ago our laptop died on us and we lost all of our info on it, including a lot of pictures. Luckily we had most of our pictures on CDs. We decided to get an external hard drive for safety sake. Well…and here comes the painful part…I was not so smart and ended up keeping everything on that including around 10,000 pictures (all of them since we have had digital cameras), all family videos, ALL of my digital scrapbooking stuff (kits, pages, EVERYTHING!), and much more. Lately I have had the feeling that we needed to back it up and put it into “outer space” as my mom puts it (online), but we have had a crazy fall with a wedding, 3 birthdays, 4 trips out of town, church stuff, and so much more so I kind of put it in the back of my mind. Well, 2 weeks ago we were at my in-laws and the hard drive dropped. It stopped working. No matter our efforts and other’s efforts we couldn’t fix it: the hard drive is what is damaged. We lost everything on there. It took me 3 days to come out of the depression I felt from that and then decided I would write my post on this very thing to keep other people from this same loss. It hurts a lot!
So why write all of that above? So you know that it can happen at any time and it is really best to act sooner than later! So…onto my tips.
My husband and I while talking about this decided that 2 or 3 storage areas are ideal. There are so many options out there: your computer, external hard drive, CDs, online storage facilities, photo printing facilities, and many more. I don’t know about you, but my computer storage is just never big enough so it just houses our software programs. External hard drives are great because they act like your computer’s hard drive and easily accessible, but as shown above are not a fool proof solution and need to be backed up continually. CDs…well, with trying to back up 10,000 picture onto discs that could potentially get damaged easily, it’s not a good solution and definitely not permanent. I would suggest that after your computer and any other external source to have an online spot where you download all of your pictures and other files.
There are many different options out there. Let’s start with online photo storage facilities where you can possibly print off your photos. Once they are downloaded they will always be there (unless otherwise stated). These are free, but may be limited in space and you will only have pictures. Plus, to download high res photos takes a LOT of time! Options like this include:
- Flickr
- Photobucket
- Picasa
- MobileMe
- SmugMug
- Snapfish
There are also a ton of online storage facilities that have different features at different prices. These are more like your computer’s hard drive. Here are just a few examples I found when researching. (Please note that offers/prices may differ depending on when you might happen to look them up):
- Dropbox: It starts off free for 2 GB of space and after that is $9.99 for 100 GB and goes up from there
- Livedrive: $7.95 per month for unlimited space, it backs up your files as you work on them, and you can view your files anywhere (including smart phones and devices)
- Carbonite: $59 a year, it backs up your files continually as long as you are connected to the internet, and you can view your files anywhere (including smart phones and devices)
- MediaFire: Free for up to 50 GB of storage space (with limitations) and starts at $1.50 per month, you can have access anywhere
There are a TON more, but that would make for a very long post! Lol! Different features work better for different people so do your homework and see which one out there works best for you! All I did was Google ‘online digital storage sites’ and came up with tons of different options. A lot of them even offer a trial version so you can try it out for free.
Gotta love the digital age, but you need to back everything up for the “just in case” moments in life! Sorry for the not-so-exciting post, but I felt it was necessary to save someone else from the same heartache!
Thanks for checking in with the blog today, Casharina will be with your tomorrow with a seasonal photography post! :o)
Dec 11, 2012 @ 19:11:00
awwww I’m so sorry for you. I always talk about what would happen if we had a fire or lost everything. I would be beyond devastated. i signed up for an insanely expensive online back up system. All I care about is my pictures. When it came time to renew after a year, I had a lightbulb moment!! I just zipped all my files down by year and month. Then i burned them on CDs. I have one set of cds at work and one set at my parents so I’m double covered! Every few months I burn another three month’s worth of pictures. I feel sooooo much better
Dec 11, 2012 @ 15:41:42
Same thing happened to me last year. It was horrible!! I did end up getting many of them back after taking my external drive to a computer shop :( I REALLY need to do online I just haven’t made the time and I know it’s gonna happen. I really need to get on it! Thanks for the great post!
Dec 11, 2012 @ 13:59:12
We use Crash Plan
We like them because they back your data up to an external hard drive AND online automatically, you just set it and forget it. I need the human element removed when it comes to something that important! They have a range of plans and as you’ve just pointed out, it’s worth it!
Dec 11, 2012 @ 10:43:56
out of topic: so sad we are not getting a calendar this year!! but I also understand all the work that goes into putting it together for us! Thank you so much for the last calendars and hope we can have one for 2014 I totally love your work and I will be sad looking at the regular/ugly one from Costco! :( oh, and great work on the storage info, i was just searching into buying a new external hard drive and online storage! Thank you!
Dec 11, 2012 @ 08:50:17
Thank you Aubrey! I am so sorry for your loss! I does take a toll on you, doesn’t it? I’ve had two scares, where my hard drive stopped working for a time, yet my husband was able to recover it all. The first time, he backed up everything once he was able to get to it. But, there were a few months in between the first and second time, and I was freaking out! I was SO worried that I would loose those few months worth of hard work and memories! I do need to find a better way to take care of this. It’s been nagging at me…
Dec 11, 2012 @ 08:15:38
I had this happen to me once too. I didn’t lose quite as much as you did, but I lost 6 months worth of photos, of which included my middle child’s first Christmas and birthday. Talk about guilt! That whole fear that the middle child always gets left out and here I go and lose what was most important to me – at the time. I’m still not completely over it, but I did decide then to backup. I tried all kinds of stuff but I was still constantly reorganizing and tagging photos that I ended up with backups of backups. And then I had to switch laptops. With tens if thousands of photos and gigabytes of scrapbook files (500+) I switched to faster USB external hard drives. That solved my storage and moving between computer issues. Last year I found Backblaze online backup. For $5/month, anything I want, including all my scrapbook files and docs are constantly backed up. It took a month but it uploaded all my important files, stores them as they are saved now, and constantly backs up any changes or new files. It may not back them up every single minute, but I feel better knowing that my backup is working regularly without me doing a thing.
Dec 11, 2012 @ 08:10:03
My DH recently installed a Raid system (an external hard drive that automatically backs up to another external), so all of my pictures and supplies are in two places, but I don’t have any off site backup. Do you have any simple suggestions that don’t involve uploading all of it online (and going way over our data limit)?
Dec 11, 2012 @ 07:27:12
thank you very much for making me think about this.
due to my incompetence (which I can’t even name for I’m so dead sure, I didn’t do anything wrong … but then again… why did happen what happened) we lost every single picture we took on our two-month trip to new zealand last year. just by writing this I feel really sad. I have a wonderful photo book (THANK GOD!) and the scrapped pages of the best pics, but the raw material i.e. photos in high resolution and all the lovely take-outs are lost.
definitely gonna talk this through with DH, who is the one in charge (or at least I keep telling myself)
thanks a lot for the ideas, aubrey!
Dec 11, 2012 @ 07:10:32
Great ideas, thanks for your help