Preserve Your Memories

Do you back up your photos? If not, you might be on a slippery slope to heartache should your laptop get stolen or your hard drive die. Some people think that burning photos to a DVD will guard against calamity. That's partly true, and it's a good short-term remedy. But the older a DVD gets, the more likely it will fail. The best strategy results in three copies. Think of the original file on your hard drive as one copy. Make a second copy by backing up the data to an external medium. Back up to a flash drive or an external hard drive, or burn a DVD and store it off-site. You can use a backup service, such as Carbonite (carbonite.com), which uses a program on your computer to automatically back up your hard drive off-site, or you can upload pictures and videos to websites such as Flickr, or SmugMug. Getting into the habit of uploading your memories off-site will not only let you share your "Kodak moments" with friends and family, it will also guard against theft, fire, and even hardware failure.