How Important Is It To Backup Your Image Files?

April 14, 2008

Backup, Backup, Backup! Don’t just read those words, live by those words. Do it before it’s too late. Backing up is the one thing that we all should do but most people don’t.

We trust these wonderful machines (computers) that we use day in and day out with all of our data and pictures, and most of that trust is blind trust. Just because all is well with the world and our computer is functioning the way it’s supposed to, doesn’t mean that it always will.

All it takes is for the hard drive to crash and all is gone! No more pictures, no more data. That’s the problem of not backing up. It seems that in the times we live in more and more of our lives are on our computers and they do crash.

A hard drive failure is equivalent to losing everything in a fire or flood now because all the precious information that we keep on our computers.

So how do you prevent it?

Well the sad thing is you can’t, but what you can do is back up the information you have on your computer in case something does happen. Most people do not back up, at least not until they lose everything.

Imagine you just had a new baby. You just bought a nice, new digital camera to take a ton of photos of the baby, documenting every day of her life. After 1 year your hard drive crashes and on that hard drive was every single picture you took of the baby…gone.

A whole year of memories are gone. If you backed them up your OK. If you didn’t then they are probably gone forever. If the thought of that is enough to scare you into backing up then let’s get into how to back up.

The first thing I do when I upload the photos from my camera to my computer is make a backup copy first thing. (note the technique will be slightly different depending on how you upload images to your computer and what operating system you are using). I use Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom to upload and edit my images. Lightroom it gives you the option to backup your images at the moment you upload them.

I have an external hard drive that I connect to my computer through it’s USB port and I select it then lightroom does the rest. It puts a copy on my computer and one on my external hard drive.

You can find external hard drives here:

If you don’t use Lightroom to upload or edit your images, you can still use the external hard drive. All you have to do is after you uploaded your images to your computer, plug in your external drive and copy the images over to the hard drive or burn them to a CD, or DVD.

Now your images are all safe because you have 2 copies of every single one right? Wrong! In theory your images are safe and sound if your hard drive does crash, but now they sit on a CD or DVD or another hard drive.

All of this media is still fairly new and we are starting to learn the limits of this media. for example CD’s or DVD’s don’t last forever. There are limits to the lifespan. Those limits are based on the quality of the dye that is used on the disk. They need to be stored in a cool, dry place in a protective covering.

You should probably store those disks or the external hard drive somewhere else off site in case something happens (which I hope never does) to your home. If the hard drive or disks are in your house and so is your computer and there is an accident, a fire or something else then both copies are gone.

Of course you could put the disks or hard drive in a fire/water proof safe to protect them if you can’t store them off site.

You can find Fire Proof Safes Here

Am I being paranoid? Perhaps, but you have to be. Once you’ve lost your images you will be too. There are a lot of different ways to back up data on a computer. The problem is if you don’t use them then they don’t do you any good. Don’t wait until it’s too late and you’ve lost all your images from the last year….

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Posted in Digital Photography Tutorials