That little warning that you see above made me think about things, a lot. First it scared me to death but when I got over it and found the fix I thought about how much worse it could have been. I will admit it has happened to us, hard drive failure, but luckily we were prepared. What about you? Are you ready for the inevitable? Or how about someone stealing your computer, phone, ipad or ipod and you loosing all of your cherished family photos? Imagine loosing all of those baby pictures of your children.
It’s a common scene. In our electronic age, many of our prized pictures are simply stored on a computer or a phone somewhere. If we are lucky on Facebook, but many times too small to use for anything. Keep in mind, that computers crash eventually. And phones get lost, stolen or occasionally take a dip in the pool. Then what do you have? Nothing.
You can save your files to CD’s. That helps a lot. But be sure you have your images on the hard drive and flash drive and CD before you reformat your flash drive. When you burn the CD be sure and verify it and check to be sure that it will open, preferably on more than one computer. Unfortunately CD’s aren’t the safest medium either.
As far as stability, photographic prints still the best bet. So I encourage all of you to take those favorite and important images and have photographic prints made. You can frame them, they will last longer. And except for a fire, they are the safest way to store your images. And the easiest way to look at them too. Oh, and an inexpensive photographic print will probably last much longer than your own ink-jet printer prints will last.
If you really want to safeguard your images, have prints made. Then burn the images to a CD and store the CD at another place like a friend or relatives house. Then, even in a fire, you can recover your precious memories.
On another note. This past weekend we were able to photograph Chance's other grandmother so now we have something with our girls and 3 of their Great Grandmothers.
Last Easter with Chance's Grandmother, Jones
Early last summer with my Grandmother, Bentley
Christmas 2010 with Chance's Grandmother, Cribbs