I did!
But 2 weeks ago, when I was up at the Quilt, Sew & Craft Show with my licensee, MemoryMixer.com, I sat in on their class about photos, storage, backup and more.
The lessons about backing up photos are relevant to backing up our artwork as well so PLEASE, read on!
I was shocked to learn about some of the research findings from the photo industry. With the advent of digital cameras, they worry about “the lost generation”. So many of us take digital photos and print very few of them. We put them on our computer assuming all is well.
But you know, hopefully from hearing stories and not first hand experience, that hard drives sometimes crash. What happens to the years of photos if that happens and you haven’t backed them up? YIKES!
After that scary revelation (because I will admit I haven’t backup iPhoto in a very long time… if ever… well, until this week.) they went on to discuss ways to back up photos.
You can use an external hard drive. (It too, may crash, but the chances of both locations crashing at the same time are slim.)
You can save the photos (or art) to CDs or DVDs. Now I, like many people, thought the main difference between the two was the amount of data they could hold. They look the same, right? Same shape, same size, the same.
Hmm… apparently not! CD’s have an average life-span of 5 years and they (the photo industry) says you shouldn’t assume the CD will hold up much longer than that. Well yikes again! I’ve been backing up to CDs for about 6+ years… better go re-backup!
What about a DVD? It holds more but how long does it last? Here’s the good news – 60 years. Much better. No need to re-backup every 5 years or less.
I wanted to pass this little lesson along so you have a secure backup system. The key to any system is duplicity – have EVERYTHING you would be sad to lose in 2 if not 3 places. Your hard drive, external hard drives, online back-up services, DVDs…
Make a plan. You’ll be happy you did if your computer decides to crash.
Here’s to your creative success & safe backup system!
– Tara
P.S. Go backup your photos too. I doubt you want to lose them either.
Thanks Tara for that information! I’m am relived to know that DVDs have such a long life span.
Good info, Tara. I must relay my experience on CD & DVD storage. I own a sign business and have 18 years of graphic files. First, I saved them to floppy disc and we know where that went, so I started saving them to CD & DVD. I had more than a few discs go bad out of the blue. One day I’d put the disc into my computer to discover that all of the data was gone. It’s a horrible feeling. They do make disc recovery programs, but the results are not very good, every time.
I now save everything to a second drive in my computer. I don’t use that drive to store anything but files. There are no programs on that drive, hoping that it would lesson the chance of a crash.
I do still have recurring nightmares about something happening to the files.
Thanks for all you do, Tara. You are a wonderful resource for all of us!
Good points! I use an external drive as back-up #1 and DVDs (now) as a secondary backup. Having had my computer crash a few years ago, I know the pain and agony of losing LOTS of stuff! NOT GOOD!
I’m fanatical about my data. I work too hard to lose it. My computer is set up with a raid array (2 hard-drives that duplicate information as I go) and an external hard-drive. The next step, which I am embarrassed to say, I have not yet acted upon, is to store a copy off-site. This is pretty easy with the new portable hard-drives. My files are too big for either CDs or DVDs to be of use, so maybe not necessary for all people, but hard-drives are soooo much easier to manage– it can all be set up automatically.