In this digital era, no area is out of technology’s touch and photography is no exception. Traditional filmmaking has now been replaced with digital photography. Where traditional photos were a hard copy and were safe with negatives or prints to store, digital photography has security issues.
Once lost in hard drive failure or accidentally deleted, you can never retrieve the digital pictures back again. Your digital memories are lost forever. Imagine losing your precious baby pictures, or college party pictures, or family vacation photos. It’s nothing less than a heartache, losing all the memories with just one single wrong click or hardware crashes.
But, don’t worry, here we will share some ways how you can save your lifetime memories forever. You can always take backups or schedule the backups of your pictures.
IMAGE: UNSPLASH
Top Ways To Make Sure Your Photos Are Always Backed Up?
1. External Drive
External devices are usually considered the standalone SATA hard drives that are connected to the computers via USB. But, these can easily fail or crash. You must consider the SSDs (Solid State Drives) as they are more reliable and stable.
They cost more than the SATA hard drives and require space and connecting wires near the computer workspace. To simplify this, you can go for the USB flash drive to reduce the cluttering of wires and would not require connecting up to your PC.
You can save these flash drives when not required and also carry them along wherever you go. They are also cheap and proffer large storing spaces.
2. USB Thumb Drives/Flash Drives
The best part about flash drives is that they are much smaller than external hard-drive. You can conveniently carry them around but their writing speed is slower.
Moreover, these USB thumb drives of a decent quality come at a cheaper price as compared to external hard-drives or cloud storage service. The only thing is that you have to be extra careful while storing the drive so that you do not lose such a small thing, otherwise all your photos are lost with the drive.
Also, to store photos in a USB thumb drive, you explicitly have to pick the photos and copy-paste them manually which can be tedious and boring.
3. Archive Photos In Cloud
There are many people who are lazy or not so proactive in saving their digital pictures. For them, the ideal way to save your memories is by syncing them to the cloud.
This way you need not worry about remembering to take the backup as the photos will automatically get saved on the drive, without manual intervention. The Mac desktop clients and many others provide good amounts of cheap or free storage.
Some efficient cloud options are – Google Drive, Dropbox, MediaFire, Microsoft OneDrive, Bitcasa, etc. You can also avail of the same services from desktop applications – Adobe Lightroom, iPhoto, Aperture, etc.
Bitcasa provides the option of saving the files in a folder on external or internal storage that syncs from the desktop to the cloud.
4. Photostick
Photostick is a wonderful and easy way to back up videos or photos very swiftly and efficiently. A Photostick is basically a small USB Flash drive and looks like a little storage stick. It lets you backup your vital data into it very easily.
After plugging it into the computer, once the computer recognizes it, a pop up will show up that you need to press. On clicking that, the Photostick will start the work by first scanning your device for the required media files like videos and photos.
Depending on the number of photos and videos there are, this process can take from some minutes up to hours. Another advantage of Photostick is that it can store images of multiple formats like GIF, JPEG, ICO, BMP, PD, TIFF, PDD, Camera Raw, PICT, and PCT and video formats like AVI, MPEG4, QT, MOV, WMV, etc.
5. Multiple Libraries
It is always better to be safe than sorry and when it comes to saving your life precious memories, one cannot take chances. To be extra careful you can also store your photos across multiple libraries.
Apple’s Aperture or iPhoto’s newest versions let the users access multiple libraries. Aperture has a unique feature in the software that makes this process very simple. You can also achieve the same effect with iPhoto along with a third-party application like Photo Library Manager.
It is very simple as you just have to move the old and unused pictures into a separate library on an external device. If you launch Aperture or iPhoto and hold the Option key down you can switch between libraries very smoothly.
Conclusion
The above five methods are easy and quick for saving or backing up your essential data like photos and videos. Whichever option you choose it is vital that it should suit you and the amount of data you want to store.
It is definitely not safe to save all your stuff on the computer because it can crash or die anytime. Even a spill of a drink or a slip of the hand can make you lose all your memorable pictures within seconds
Thus, backing up your photos is very important to keep your cherished digital memories safe. Choose the method that is ideal and easy for you to manage.
If you are interested in even more technology-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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