I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard of people losing all of their photos from their pc or memory cards. Its one of those things we always think, ‘oh that won’t happen to me!’… and inevitably… it takes the loss of precious photos to make you decide to back up.
I had it happen to me a few years ago. It was february 2009, and my cousin had just died suddenly. I kept all of my personal photos on an external harddrive, sat on top of the pc base unit. I was assigned the job of making the order of services for Cheryls funeral. I was printing masses of these little booklets, I leaned down to change the paper in the printer and watched in horror as my harddrive fell 2 feet to the floor.
It was broken. Completly useless. I was one of the unlucky ones, I sent it off to be repaired, by the professionals. I didn’t care the cost, the photos of my cousin were on that drive and I NEEDED them back. Unfortunately the drive was too badly damaged. Luckily I had my favorite photos on a photo sharing website (flickr.com) so I could download some of them. I never did manage to recover the videos though.
Recently one of my friends had the misfortune of losing their photos too, this prompted me to write this post.
Back up your photos, before its too late. And back up regularly. Ideally, have more than one backup.
I backup to two external drives, then put my favorites onto discs, and also online. I refuse to lose all my irreplaceable photos ever again. Please don’t just have one copy of those photos. And if you can, have a copy at a family members house. So that in the event of a fire etc there is another backup somewhere safe!
And while I’m being all bossy and ranty, print your photos! Don’t just leave them sat wasted on your pc, your kids will love looking through albums and remembering all the good times you’ve had!
