Photo Backup: A Simple 2-Step Approach

With almost all cameras today being digital, our computer hard drives are the repository of all our photo memories. As those drives fill up, the photos are often burned to a CD or DVD and deleted off the hard drive to free some space for new photos.

But what happens to those photos after a few years? All backup media have a finite lifetime. Would you be able to get the files off that disk, even if you can find them? Would you even have a drive that can read them? Here is a simple two-step alternative approach that makes it easier to work with your photos and keeps them safe:

Firstly, keep the photos on the hard drive. Having all your photos at your fingertips makes it much easier to browse and sort through them to pick photos for collages and slide shows. As long as you have a good photo-browsing application, finding any photo is fast and easy.

If you keep your photos live on your hard drive, it is easy to upgrade to a newer, bigger hard drive: Just copy the files over to the new drive and you’re done. With hardware standards changing every couple of years, it makes sense to have your photo collection on a drive that uses current technology.

Once you have photos on different disks lying around, it’s very difficult to find them. There are archiving applications that can help you, but to take a closer look still requires you to get the original disks.

Secondly, backup to DVD or CD. Regular backups ensure that you can get the files back in case of drive failures or disasters. Using a good backup program should enable you to restore your files exactly as they were during the last backup.

A regular backup to CD or DVD also gives you the assurance that, if you accidentally deleted some photos or changed them and overwritten the originals, you can still get the original photos back.Doing your backup to DVD or CD allows you to store the backup disks at the house of a family member, to protect them against disasters that may strike your home.

Following these two simple steps can save you a lot of time when working with your photo collection and protects you against a theft or disaster wiping out years of family memories.

If your backup does not fit onto one CD or DVD anymore, Abbackup can help. Once you’ve done a full backup, you usually need only one disk per backup. Abbackup is the easiest way to backup to DVD.

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