Backup Everything
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 9:00AM
Most people have computers and most people have digital cameras. These are facts.
Twenty years ago, nobody had a digital camera and most people didn't have computers. If you wanted a photo, it was printed and usually stored somewhere...maybe a photo album of some kind. Because they were printed and stored, they usually didn't get lost. There can be circumstances beyond your control that cause you to lose your photos i.e. losing your home and your belongings to a storm or fire. People who have lived through these types of tragedies always say if they could have saved any belongings it would be the photos. Those are not replaceable.
These days it's all digital. People still store prints, but there's usually a digital copy somewhere on their computer or a disc. Still, many people keep all of their digital files on one computer with no backup. If you do this, you're setting yourself up to lose everything. Computer hard drives fail constantly. Once they fail, that data is gone forever unless you've backed everything up to another source like an external hard drive. And those can fail too.
Backup everything. External hard drives are really cheap right now. You can get a 2TB external drive for $150.00. That may sound like more storage than you'll ever need, but if you take a lot of photos and do a lot of editing, it can fill quickly. Especially if you work with RAW files or any kind of file that uses little or no compression. If you decide to store all of your photos on an external drive instead of on your computer, you need to back that up too, so you'll need two.