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Ways To Protect Your Precious Photos Without Spending A Fortune
As someone who works at a data recovery lab, I'm usually the front line dealing with customers. Our technical skills usually have to take a back seat to our emotional ones. When dealing with a distraught bride, groom, parent, or grandparent, there's little I can do beyond comfort them and tell them we'll do what we can to get those wedding, baby, or honeymoon photos back. Its often not the time to talk about how their tragedy could have been prevented. However, the right time (before this happens) usually isn't great either as nobody seems to think that catastrophic failure is a possibility to them. (It's like trying to sell life insurance to people who don't imagine themselves ever dying). As someone who works with hard drives all the time, I can tell you that a hard drive dying is about as uncertain as death and taxes. Backing up your photos doesn't need to be an expensive process. For anyone who thinks that's paying taxes is a possibility for them, here are some tips to protect your memories on a budget. Lower image resolutions Get rid of bad photos Use free storage Lower image resolutions If you're not a professional photographer, than you probably don't need playground photos stored in high resolution. If you're out just having fun and want memories for later, consider bringing down the resolution of your images so you don't need to take as much storage space. Unfortunately the tendency of hard drives to increase in capacity without getting any larger physically has given us the sense that digital space is infinite. The reality is that device components get more and more fragile as density get higher. We see a lot of brand new super-sized external hard drives with a terabyte of storage space through our doors. You might be better served to buy a smaller capacity drive that has a lower likelihood of breaking apart on you. Get rid of bad photos When we do recover data, we find a plethora of duplicated photos that get in the way of finding the photos most precious to you. If you had to re-take a shot due to lighting or something came out blurry, delete it right away. This helps you keep track of photos better and uses much less storage space on your backups and hard drive. Oftentimes, the recovery process allows us to get at the pictures but not the file information (such as the date, etc). Having less stuff in there you don't want also makes the sorting easier if you do need to do a recovery. Use free storage With all the websites out there offering photo sharing, why would you not use it? Sure they don't allow high resolution photos to be uploaded (but our most precious memories are just as good viewable as it is in HD). Having your photos stored online is also a great way to make sure you never lose it. The whole purpose of photos is that we can share it with our friends. Photo sharing websites such as Flickr or even Facebook are great ways to backup your photos for free and at the same time gives you an easy portal to show the grandparents. If you're a professional photographer or take your photos seriously, there are more private and dependable solutions that don't cost too much as well. If you're getting paid thousands to shoot a wedding, its well worth the effort to make sure those photos don't disappear while you're editing them. Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com With a background in engineering, Terri works for Revival Technologies, a firm which specializes in Data Recovery. |
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