Storing Your Digital Photos

It’s super easy to snap 100 pictures while you’re simply playing at the park with your kids and eventually you’ll end up with quite a few pictures on your hard drive. What’s the best solution to free up space on your hard drive and make sure your pictures are safe? I’ve put a lot of thought and research into my current solution and thought I’d share.

Last Year…

Last year my external drive ,with tons of pictures of my daughter as a newborn, crashed and the geek squad was unable to recover anything. I was distraught, infuriated, confused and discouraged. Since this happened I’ve been in pretty much non-stop “fix it” mode because this happening again just isn’t an option.

The #1 thing I recommend doing is using Carbonite to backup your computer. I was skeptical of this service at first, having had the all saving external drive fail on me so easily, but I am so impressed with their services.

The #2 thing I recommend doing is printing off your most treasured photographs periodically and placing them in an album. My favorite photo album for archiving your favorite photos without the effort of scrapbooking is from The Container Store. They have page inserts you can purchase with different size picture options and horizontal and vertical layouts.

The #3 thing I recommend doing is purchasing a reliable external hard drive. These things can get sketchy if you move them from one computer to another (what I did) and they’ll sometimes reformat themselves. Keep your external drive consistent with one computer if possible and back up only what you feel like you can’t lose. This is a precautionary step, since nothing is 100% reliable, the goal is to have as many copies of your important photographs without it becoming a job to keep up.

I’m in the process of researching Smug Mug for photo backup at the moment and will report back with my thoughts and a review.