Digital Pictures

A friend enlightened me this weekend that my 13,000 digital pictures that I have taken over the past 4 years of owning a camera may be in jeopardy. If you are a digital camera owner, have you thought about your pictures? Where do you store them? How do you back them up? If you are putting the CD's like I have been-then you have a problem. Apparently data on CD's and DVD's (depending on the quality) has a shelf life of 2-10 years. So what do you do? Interestingly enough-I was again enlightened by another friend that the Library of Congress is categorizing every known song to man...on LP's! Why? Because they last. So as you ponder and panic about your photos...fear not-here is what the expert's say....

1. Buy an external hard drive...and back your music, videos etc...
2. Buy a flash drive that you use in a limited capacity.
3. Buy online storage from a reputable and well known website.
4. Consider still using CD's and DVD's but invest in the quality-and after several years-back those up again.
5. When you do back up media-keep it in alternative places. Store CD's and DVD's in dark, cool, dry environments...and keep a copy outside of your home.
6. SHARE...most articles encourage you to share your images with family and friends-give a CD for Christmas or birthdays that they too will hopefully download onto their computer. This extends the copies of your images in case yours are ever lost.
7. Back up your backups...if you buy an external hard drive-also store them on DVD's etc...
8. Some of us used to actually print photos-which again-is always a great way to preserve your images.

Here are some great articles about preserving digital photos...

http://www.picnam.com/Articles/PreservingDigitalPhotos.html

http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2005-01-20-digital-memories-sidebar_x.htm

http://www.pcworld.ca/news/column/a1ac9c720a01040800b24c9a7f5ded73/pg1.htm