Save It Then Back It Up

If you are like many of us in the photographic world you have made the leap into "Digital Photography". You have your camera and you are learning the basics of shooting and dealing with digital images. We are finding that there is one common issue with all of our customers. How do you organize and store your files?

We recommend that you keep it simple. Most of the digital cameras come with software that lets you move the images from your camera to your computer. There is usually also a program that will let you organize these images into groups and sub-groups. Adobe makes a good image editing program called "Photoshop". The full blown version is expensive and has many features that the average person would never use but the "Baby Brother" version called "Photoshop Elements" sells for under $100 and has great editing capabilities and a very good structure for organizing your images.

Once you have things organized the thing we find that most people fail to do is back-up their images. If you are just keeping the pictures on your camera memory card or if you just load them into your computer, you are running the risk of loosing these files if the card or computer hard drive fails.

We have all heard horror stories of hard drives crashing. If the drive in your computer stops working you will loose all of the images you have stored there. Devise a back-up strategy to make sure that you have your pictures stored in more than one place. You might want to put a second hard drive into your computer and copy all the files from one hard drive to the other so that you have a second copy on the other hard drive. Or you may want to use an external hard drive that would let you back-up the images but move the drive from PC to PC. Or maybe it is easier for you to just make a copy of all of the files on a number of CD's or DVD's. A data CD usually store about 700 megs of information and a data DVD stores about 4.7 gigs.

The point is to make sure that you have at least two copies of every digital image that you want to save. Taking a little bit of time now to figure out a storage and back-up plan will pay off big dividends if your system ever crashes and you loose your primary source of storage.