How important are your photos to you? What would the impact be if you were to lose all the photos stored on your PC?

For professional (and serious amateur) photographers, there could be a financial impact, and for all photographers, losing all your photo memories could be devastating!



Do you backup your photos regularly? If your only copy of photos is on the hard drive of your computer, there are many ways in which they could be lost, including:

• the hard drive in your computer could crash or fail
• a virus can delete or corrupt photos
• your PC could be stolen
• someone could accidently over-write or delete the photos

You might think the chance of one of the above is so small that it will never happen to you. That is being a bit naive - people do lose important data regularly, and it could happen to you when you least expect it!



You cannot assume a hard drive will keep running perfectly forever. In fact, even multiple drive failures can and do occur.

Photographer Nic Bezzina recently lost 6 years of photos because his main and backup drives failed within hours of each other. A hard drive recovery service managed to recover 50,000 photos off his drive, but it wouldn't have been cheap (estimated cost was about $5000). A google cache version of his story is available here.

I've lost count of the number of times I've seen people post tales of woe on the redbubble forums about a computer crash or hard drive crash that caused them to lose their photos, and they want to recover the high-resolution copies uploaded to redbubble (redbubble used to help out, initially for free, then at a cost, but no longer provide a recovery service, as stated here in their FAQ).



With the chance of losing your photos an important reality, it highlights the need to backup your photos. Having a backup copy of your photos will ensure that a single event will not result in the loss of those photos.



There are many different ways to backup your photos (and other data). Performing a backup does not have to be a a difficult or complex exercise.

Options include backing up your data to:

• tape drive
• CDROM
• DVD
• a second internal hard drive
• external hard drive
• NAS (network-attached-storage) device
• internet-based storage

Each of these options has pros and cons, so it's important to evalulate each of the options, to determine which one (or which combination of multiple options) is most appropriate for your needs.

The intention of this post isn't to go into detail about the options, but is designed to highlight the need to do regular backups. For more information about the various options, I can recommend Brian Auer's Complete Guide to Photo Backups.



Hopefully this post has made you think about the impact if you were to lose all your photos, and the importance of having a backup strategy.

If you don't have a backup strategy, then implement one right now!

(The same comments apply to other data stored electronically too, including email, documents, address book, etc, and is certainly not limited to photos only.)