QFR: What is the best way to back up your digital pictures?

QUESTION FROM READER (QFR):
What is the best way to back up your digital pictures?

This is an extremely important question and I'm glad J.S. took the time to send it in. Data management, regardless if it's your pictures, checking account files, spreadsheets, documents, and even emails, should be a part of your computing procedures. Backing up data is easy, you just have to know what to do.

After thinking about it, here are 10 Kick-Start Tips that come to mind and should be considered. If you do all these, you'll be in a VERY good position for safe backups.

1. Make The Backups: Yes, actually doing the first step is important! Don't think that your computer will never crash or you don't need a simple plan because when it happens, you'll be in trouble! Now don't get me wrong, there are ways to get back data regardless of the state of it, but this is most likely sending your hard drive out to a company that provides data recovery services. Oh, and it'll cost you some serious dollars.

2. Schedule The Backups: make a time when you do the backups depending upon how much activity on the data you have. For example: If you are making changes daily, you should backup daily whereas if you're only making changes to the data on your computer once a month, perhaps monthly backups will suffice.

3. ALWAYS Make Multiple Copies: Sometimes backed up data on media goes bad. This is why it's important to backup your information multiple times in the event one of them goes back you have a back up.

4. ALWAYS Make Copies on Different Media: The life of media, or how long it can be used without having failures and restore problems, depends on what you're using. Recordable CDs and DVDs are very cheap now if your computer supports it. The shelf life on these is around 10 years. If not, you could simply upgrade and purchase a CD/DVD burner for ~$30-50 dollars. You could also use external USB hard drives or even free online solutions. DO NOT make backups on floppy disks anymore! Go to a solution that is more reliable.

6. Store Backups Appropriately: No matter what kind of media you use, if you don't properly store the media in an appropriate place, you'll lose the information. Example: Even if you take a DVD you recorded on which typically lasts 10 years and place it on the back windshield of your car, you'll lose the information. The sun will damage it for sure and probably make you a nice melted silicone wafer sculpture. Media should be backed up at room temperature or less and in some cases even in a colder environment (read media details for information on best storage conditions).

Free online references:
Mozy Online Backup - http://mozy.com (2Gigs free)
XDrive - http://www.xdrive.com (5Gigs free)
IDrive-E - http://www.idrive.com (2Gigs free)
Backup Review - http://www.backupreview.info (This site has a wealth of information on online storage and data backup. Thanks to the person who sent in the anonymous comment to this post! Note the 10 Ten Providers and reviews available.)

7. VERIFY Your Data's Integrity: This ensures that not only your data has been backed up properly, but it has backed up intact and fully usable. I assisted some folks with this awhile back for their business and they were backing up the information according to their procedures but when I audited their procedure and verified the data, NOTHING was there. They were basically going through the motions for months and not actually backing anything. As you can probably imagine, this would've been devastating if a recovery was needed.

8. NEVER Work From Your Originals: Kind of photography specific, but extremely important when working with your photos. ALWAYS make a copy of the original and work off the copy. The original should be backed up on multiple medias with multiple copies and only used when you need another working copy.

9. Data Retention: How long you keep your data is up to you. Keep in mind that backed up data on media doesn't last forever. It's a good idea to go back through your copies and ensure they're still good. You can do data integrity checks as mentioned in Tip # 7 above.

10. Offsite Storage: Always make sure at least one or two of your multiple copies are stored at an offsite location. This could be at a trusted neighbors house, a family member, a post office box or consider the online storage mentioned in Tip # 6 above. This is important if you accidentally have a disaster in your house or where you use this information. (like a fire, flood, etc).

Thanks for the question and hopefully this answers it and provides you with some solid guidance. If there are additional questions, please send them in.

QFR submitted by: J.S. (CT)