Works for me Wednesday #6 - Backing up photos

Last night I was excitedly moving files around onto my new external hard drive and that reminded me of something. Backing up files is really such an important job and there are so many different options. Especially for photos.

We got our first digital camera when Abby was 3 months old. That was when we realized that it was either go digital or spend our paychecks on film and processing because we were obsessed a bit carried away with taking photos of our first new baby girl. Once we had the camera and could click away without feeling guilty for spending our last pennies in the name of posterity, I began to worry about what would happen to our photos if our computer crashed or our hard drive were ever corrupted. It was hard going from having hard copies of every photo that you could hold in your hands and tenderly place away in a photo album to knowing that every precious photo was only a few bits (or bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, etc.) on a spinning disk.

That's when I discovered Shutterfly. Now there are a lot of different photo sharing sites (Kodak, Photobucket, Picasa, Flickr - just to name a few) and there are things to love and things to hate about each of them. I'm not trying to endorse any one in particular. And backing up photos online is only one option anyway. But I feel safer knowing that all of the photos of my little ones are stored in at least two completely separate geographic locations. Not to mention that it makes it easy to share photos online with friends and family or on my blog. My photos are password protected so only those people who I share them with can see them.

Whatever way that you decide to back up your digital photos and files, please just remember to back them up so you're not taking the risk of losing them forever. It works for me!

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