I’ve had conversations with photographer friends from time to time about the strategies they use to back up their files. In those conversations, we discuss camera cards, computers, hard drives and both connected and remote offsite storage. More on that in a bit.
But as we all know, computers are not the only way we capture our photographs now. In this age of mobile devices, many of us take pictures on our cellphones equally often and keep all of those images on our cellphones only. I discovered this when talking to customers in the camera store who come in looking to print their cellphone images for friends and family. Many don’t have data plans, so backup of these images is not generally something they consider and they are genuinely surprised when I casually ask.
Some cellphone operators provide an unlimited pseudo-storage service where a thumbnail sized version of the original image on the phone is always accessible in the cloud. These take up virtually no space but also can’t be downloaded and printed to share or put up on a wall. Great for social media only. If the phone dies or is somehow corrupted, the original images are gone forever.
To complicate this further, many of us now include video in our collections, again on the phone or through any of many other recording devices. Video has become a major element in my media collection now so it too requires some type of backup solution.
Over the course of the last couple of years, I’ve considered all of the sources of my media and have come up with options that I feel comfortable with. Likely overkill for most, but might be worth a read…
Continue reading “Backing Up is Hard to Do”
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