Nothing feels quite as horrible as losing your camera, dropping your card into some coffee (guilty) or having your hard drive go on the fritz. It’s costly, time-consuming and there’s no 100% guarantee you’ll get your images back – unless you’ve properly backed them up all along.
If you took photos during the recent holiday season (like most normal people), then you probably have a ton of images sitting on your camera and/or computer still. Those photos need two things: 1. a backup and 2. to be printed. I know many, many people leave photos on their cameras for a long time before printing them, some don’t even back them up at all *gasp*
I get it. Plugging your camera in and sitting around while you dump all 1, 659, 432 photos onto your computer doesn’t sound like a thrilling way to spend your evening or weekend. But backing up photos doesn’t take long at all, trust me! I backup hundreds of photos weekly and it takes me all of three minutes (no joke) after each photo shoot to get it done. I also have an automatic backup scheduled on my computer every night, so it does it while I’m sleeping for just $4 a month. How easy (and cheap) is that?
In addition to a regular backup, invest in a good external disk. So while you’re sleeping, not only are your images (and all other important info) going off to a cloud somewhere, they’re also going to a hard drive that’s sitting in your own home.
And don’t just blindly rely on those two back-ups, TEST them. Next to that horrible feeling you get when you lose the camera or drop it in coffee is that other horrible feeling you get when you discover your backup didn’t work and your files are still gone. That scenario completely kills the joy of the holidays you just experienced and replaces it with feelings of utter disbelief, extreme disappointment and an empty, photoless life.
So I urge all of you, take just a few moments and setup at least one form of backup for your images. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. And while you’ll always have the memories in your mind, you know you want to have some photographic proof that your younger cousin danced on the tables after a little too much eggnog last Christmas (specifically to show any future girlfriends, am I right?)!
And once you’ve got them backed-up, print a few out. You know, just in case said future girlfriend needs proof that your younger cousin truly is a party-animal.
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