Matt Bango Photography

How much are your pictures worth to you? Whether you are a professional, amateur or just someone who takes pictures of family and friends, each image is priceless. If you value your digital images, then you need to have a proper backup solution in place. In this article we’ll take a look at some methods to store your photos, how serious the problem of lost digital photos really is and some backup tips so that you can be worry free and enjoy all of those priceless memories and photos now and in the future.

When my hard drive crashed and burned, I was very quickly reminded that the probability of a hard drive to crash is directly related to the number of irreplaceable photographs stored on that hard drive. That’s not really true, but sometimes it seems like it. Fortunately, I had most of my stuff backed up, but I still lost a lot of my irreplaceable photos because I didn’t have a proper backup schedule in place. But really, who has time to do backups every day?

Something scary that I had read a while back was that the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) performed a study on photographers about their backups. A scary figure came out of their study. Only 48% of people backup all or most of their data. That leaves 52% of photographers to lose, and I cannot emphasize this enough, irreplaceable images. Are you one of those 52% who are at risk of losing a lot of money, time and memories? Let’s try to fix that.

Digital images are stored in “bits”, which are either are binary 1 or 0. You don’t really need to know how this works, but just be aware that digital images are nothing other than data or “bits” arranged in a specific order. With that said, there are basically two methods to store your digital photos. The first storage method is magnetic storage, which would be devices such as hard disks. The second storage method is optical storage, which would be CDs and DVDs.

Let?s first talk about magnetic storage devices. The great thing about hard disks is that the capacity is ever growing and the price drops every day. It’s easy to find a 200 gigabyte hard drive for well under $100. If you’re not familiar with gigabytes, think of it this way. A 200 gigabyte hard drive can store approximately 25,000 six mega pixel uncompressed RAW images. With the price of hard disks dropping every day, this is a very attractive way to go when deciding on a backup solution that fits your needs and budget.

Optical storage, such as DVDs are also becoming extremely cheap. You can get a 100 pack of DVDs for around $30. Each DVD only stores 4.47 gigabytes of data, but they still can hold about 6 times as much data as a CD can. There are a few different formats that DVDs come in, DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW and DVD-RW. Not every DVD drive recognizes all the different formats, but most recent DVD burners/players do.

Do you really have to worry about losing your digital photos? The truth is yes, unless you have a proper backup solution in place. If you’re storing all of your digital photos on your PC, you?re relying on 1 single hard drive to keep your photos safe. The truth is, there are numerous ways to lose your photos. Hard drive crashes, viruses, file corruption, fire, flood, theft; the list goes on and on. If you don’t have your digital photos stored on your PC, then you might have them stored on a CD or DVD. This should keep your photos safe, right? Wrong, CDs have just as good of a chance of data loss as hard drives do. Did you know that CDs don’t always burn correctly, can degrade over time and even melt from sunlight? There are experts who go as far as suggesting that you store CDs vertically rather than on top of each other.

Let’s take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of each medium.

As you can see, both have their advantages and disadvantages. So what I do is I combine the best of both worlds. I backup every shoot I take on an external hard drive. So my photos are now on 1 internal hard drive and 1 external hard drive. But what happens if there’s a flood or fire? Since all my photos are in the same room, my photos will be gone. The first step I take to prevent this disaster is to archive my photos each month (they are organized by date). At the end of each month, I burn a DVD(s) containing all of the photos that I had shot that month. I then send it off to my parents’ house where they will keep it. That way in case of a fire or flood, I will have a backup of my photos at their house that I can always fall back on. If that happens, then I would lose all of my images from the current date, right? Nope, I upload the current photos to a web server to prevent that from happening. That’s my backup plan; hopefully it will help you make one that works for you. Here are a few tips to help you develop your own plan.

• Always maintain at least two independent copies of your images. This would preferably be on both a magnetic and optical storage solution.
• Get an external hard drive (they?re cheap these days). Store your photos on both your internal and external hard drive and also an optical storage option.
• Try to store at least 1 copy of your backups in a place that is not in the same place as your hard drives. If there is a fire or flood, you still have the possibility to lose all of your images.
• When you are burning backups, make sure they burn correctly as many times they can burn incorrectly and your backup will be worthless.

So there you have it, some information to help you get started on your backup plan. Trust me, I’ve lost irreplaceable photos because I didn’t have a proper backup plan in place, it’s worth it to take the time to backup. What are you waiting for? Start designing your backup solution! If you have any questions you can contact me.

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