Take a Picture, It’ll Last Longer

The Backstory
A funny thing happened on the way to living our lives – we ended up with seven thousand digital photos. It started out innocently enough… checking off the “Put Photos on a Floppy Disk” option when dropping off rolls of 35mm shots at CVS. Years later we’re sitting on close to 9 gigabytes of data.

Many of our photos will not be eligible to win awards because they’re the kind of photos everyone takes. Camping trips, parties, super-hot silver cars, and maybe one or two of the cats… but they’re our photos and are important to us.

In days gone by we’d take printed photos and put them in the (relative) safety of a shoebox or photo album. Now we hardly print them out, only to fill the occasional album or photo frame. Many of our photos will remain bits and bytes forever.

I use to be fairly obsessive about backing up our pics onto shiny metal discs. This gave me the good feeling of knowing that should hard drive failure occur (it has, it will), our data would be tucked away somewhere safe.

That somewhere might even be your house. I’ve been stealthily leaving CD-R spindles of MP3 music files with friends for years, and leaving DVD-R’s of photos at my folk’s place whenever I got the chance. The thinking being that should wherever we were living be sucked into a black whole, I wouldn’t have to worry about our photos and data.

This was all well and good for then. The reality of now is that the allotted time I’ll have to burn discs will mostly likely be shrunk down considerably. The reality of the next few months is that we’re going to have this new life around here who will no doubt be attracting copious flashcubes, increasing the number of photos we have exponentially.

Dealing with the Ones and Zero’s
So here’s how I’m handling this. A few months ago I met up with a few co-workers (including DJ Sipe) and went to a local nerdy user group meeting to hear a guy from Amazon.com’s Web Services group come and speak about all the very nerdy things they offer web folks such as myself.

One of the things they offer is online storage. Cheap, plentiful online storage. And not just any old storage, backed-up backup-up storage. Whenever you upload a file to them (say a photograph), they automagically make backup copies of it at remote locations around the world. Should meteors strike down one of their server farms, our photos will be safely backed up at another.

And its cheap, too! It costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 a month to keep all our photos on their servers. I compare that with the $30+ a year I was spending on blank CD’s and DVD’s and then add in all the time it took me to burn them and, for me, it’s a moderate no-brainer. The only real downside is that the setup was a little complicated, and uploading all the photos took almost a week… but being able to set it and forget it makes it all worthwhile.

But
I wouldn’t recommend Amazon’s backup system to most folks… it’s complicated to set up and not very user friendly for day to day use. There are plenty of other online backup options that make it fairly easy to backup your data online. Picassa Web Albums and Flickr are good places to leave your digital photos, and Google Docs and Adobe Buzzword allow for online document storage and editing.

Save yourself from tears! Back up your data somehow!