When you take photos you expect them to last a lifetime. Often times those photos are lost forever simply because they were not probably backed up. It is time to learn how to make your photos last a lifetime.
Technology advances have brought us many great conveniences. One of the big advancements is the ease and ability to take photos. These advances have made it possible to capture life in picture form on a daily basis and at a rate that is faster than ever before. Digital camera prices are at an all-time low and easily available to purchase. With the boom of smartphones over the years coupled with the camera quality increasing, we are snapping photos at a rapid rate.
According to a New York Times article published in 2015, it was estimated that by 2017 consumers would take more than one trillion photos. This is a drastic difference from 2000 when consumers snapped around 80 billion. Since 2010 this has nearly tripled with consumers capturing around 35 trillion.
In addition to the easy access to take digital photos, the growth of social media sites has us snapping more photos than usual.
But despite the enormous value of these photos and videos, most people don’t have a backup. It’s time to shine a light on this essential task and make it a regular habit before those precious memories are gone forever.
If you asked someone what possession they’d save from a house fire, most would say photos. With digital photos, you don’t need a fire to lose everything, they could simply disappear in the blink of an eye with hardware failure or theft. There’s no warning, no smoke alarm, and without a plan already in place, no chance to recover the data. It’s time to get set up with a true backup system.
Is one copy enough?
You might think saving your information to an external hard drive or flash drive is enough. While this option is better than nothing, since the data is stored in only one place, this isn’t a backup – it’s just storage. That drive could fail at any moment, perhaps from age, malfunction or plain old theft.
Often enough, that drive even becomes lost over the years, put somewhere ‘safe’ and promptly forgotten. Technology is ever changing and accessing that data in 5 years could even pose a problem.
Two copies?
You might have your extra storage drive as backup and keep a copy on your computer. This is a better solution, and how most people store their data, but it still isn’t enough. Protection against device failure is a plus, but that house fire is going to take both copies up in flames. Theft would likely leave you without any copies as these are usually the first to be stolen. This is a decent option, but still not the best.
The rule of three
We subscribe to the backup rule of three. Just reading this may sound like overkill, but tech is fragile and device failure is a constant risk. We recommend keeping one copy on the computer/device, another on an external drive, and a third copy as last resort tucked safely away in the cloud. The cloud backup can be fully automated so there is no need to worry about remembering it. If the day comes that you need your data back, it’s ready and waiting in perfect condition. Cloud technology also means your data is far away from any potential fire or flood. This makes it secure and with the right provider, guaranteed against loss.
The bottom line is, pictures are very important to us, they tell our stories and bring back memories long lost in the corners of our minds. Taking the extra time and precautions to back them up properly is well worth the investment.
Here is a link to our previous blog on cloud storage.