Welcome to the final installment on Photography, and also my last “Saturday with Shauna” here on the Singles blog!  In the past three weeks we’ve covered why you should intentionally take more photos of your family and friends, tips on taking better photos, and making albums and wall photos from your digital images.  This week we will discuss archiving because let’s face it, computers crash.  You want to keep your images safe so when disaster strikes, you won’t lose your precious memories.

So after you’ve taken some photos, you download the photos from your camera or memory card to your computer, right?  That’s what most of us do, I believe.  That’s a great start!  You now have the images saved to your computer, but what next?  What if your computer crashes?  Here’s what I recommend:

Get yourself an external hard drive!  They connect to any computer via USB and you can get a lot of space for very little money.  For example, here’s a Seagate external hard drive on amazon.com that hold three terabytes for only $119.99.  Do you know how many photos you could store in three terabytes of space?  A LOT.  Totally worth spending a hundred bucks or so on.

So after you get yourself one of these, as soon as you download your photos to your computer you then want to copy your photos over to the external hard drive.  At this point, your photos are still on your camera, on your computer, and on your external hard drive.  Three places, but we’re still not safe.  You have to delete the photos from your camera/memory card at some point in order to take more photos, so you really only have them saved in two places.  But both your computer and your external hard drive could crash, so what else should we do?  Burn them onto a CD.

Your computer should have a CD drive that is capable of burning discs but if not, you can find USB CD drives fairly cheap.  You’ll want to keep blank CD’s on hand so that you can quickly burn a CD of your new photos.  Label it and file it away somewhere, preferably in a fire-proof safe.  Or if you already have a security deposit box at your bank, your CD’s would be a great addition to that.  If you have neither, you can pick up a small fire-proof safe at your local Wal-Mart or Target for around $30.  It’s worth the investment because not only can you store your photo CD’s in it, but you can also store important documents like birth certificates, marriage certificates, titles, deeds, etc.

At this point, we have our photos on our computer, an external hard drive, and a CD.  I’m assuming by now you’ve deleted them from your camera/memory card so you can take more photos 🙂  In my opinion, this is still not enough.  What if you lose your CD or it gets scratched or broken?  The last thing I’d recommend is storing your photos in a cloud drive online.

Why store your photos online?  Because if your computer crashes, your external hard drive is damaged or lost, and your CD is scratched and can’t be read, you will still have your photos online.  Most online storage websites back up your data also, so chances are pretty good that your photos will always be there when you need them.  Some websites charge a fee, so you may need to shop around to find one in your price range.  Here are some examples:

Flickr – you will need to pay for a Pro account in order to save uncompressed photos.

Photobucket – free unlimited photo storage (with file size limits).

Mozy – paid online data backup, not only for photos, but for all your files.

These are just a few, I’m sure if you do a Google search you can find more to choose from.  There are lots of pros to having cloud storage, but a major con is that websites can be hacked and your photos could be viewed or even stolen.  So even though I recommend it in addition to your computer, external hard drive, and CD storage, you will have to decide for yourself if the risks and costs are worth it to you.

So there you have it.  I hope you have found this series helpful in your photographic journey!  Please be sure to share some of your photos with us on the Facebook community group page and also leave a comment below!

<3 Shauna

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You can find Shauna blogging about her other hobbies such as knitting, crochet, and cooking on her personal website, www.workhomeplay.net.  She also blogs on GCH: What’s on Your Plate? on Tuesdays.