Are you backed up? An important reminder for anyone who has a computer

I don't often right informative posts (in fact this may be the first?!) but I feel the need to inform and remind everyone, especially clients, about the value of proper image storage (stop yawning, this could save you from disaster)

So you have a digital camera yes? And you've had professional photos taken and received them on disk too? Great. How many external copies have you made? Huh? Stop sweating, now is your chance to redeem your storage sins.

In this day and age, we all have thousands of images, either on our computer, memory card or lying around on DVD/CDs. It is unlikely that you intend to print all the images but you do want to keep them, you want to be able to view them and share them whenever you like. Imagine for a second you came home and turned your computer on. It doesn't work. It's dead. Now what? Well data recovery from a hard drive is possible but at over $500 a pop is that really the best plan?
Here's a better one- external hard drives. These little guys can save you a lot of heartache and for not to much $$$ you'll be able to sleep easy. I highly recommend that everyone, anywhere, go out and invest in two quality hard drives, then do the following-

-Back up ALL your images, especially those stored on disks (disks are great for sharing photos around but their life span is a lot shorter than yours and they scratch very easily). You can also save any valuable documents onto your hard drive.

-Once you've filled both hard drives with all your priceless memories, hide one out of sight (to avoid it getting nicked in a break in) and send the other to a trusted family or friend's house. Heaven forbid your place is struck by fire, flood or theft, at least your irreplaceable wedding/family photos will live on.

I really can't stress enough how important this is, we all intend to do these things, they go on the 'list of must-dos' but it's usually not until tragedy strikes that we realise it's still sitting on the list.

Go get backed up!

- Clare