We've made a habit of backing up our photos from the camera but forget about the phones sometimes. My phone decided to stop working last weekend and somehow it wiped out the memory card. I lost a lot of good photos but the ones I'm most upset about are of the first moments my daughter came into this world. It was only 3 or 4 pics but they were pics I only had on my phone. We do have quite a few we took after she was all cleaned up but some of her first moments here are only in my memory now . So remember to backup your phones as well since nowadays we take so many photos with them.
Look up dropbox. Its a free service you can hook up all your devices and PC to that syncs and stores your media across all, backed up on their server. They have both android and iPhone apps for phones and tablets. I use it, great stuff.
Any important stuff gets pulled from the phone or camera very quickly. Some not so important stuff too. It's a tough lesson to learn. I have a couple of disc cases full of cds and dvds as well as a couple external drives with what I'd guess to be hundreds, if not thousands, of pics saved. Hopefully, none of that media takes a dump.
I've been doing backups as my career in an enterprise company since 1999. Every person should be keeping a minimum of three copies. Here is what I do. Hopefully this helps. First the photo's are downloaded to the same computer and stored on that computer. Second I use a photo site, Smugmug.com to upload my photos. It's 35/year and they store the full size image you upload. (Not all photo sites are equal. Many of them store your image at a lower quality meaning you can not recover the original size from their site, and they often charge to send you a cd of your photos that are not the original size.) To download, you simply go to their site and right click and download the photo. There are not size restrictions for this site, and it's great for linking your photos to share on forums and places like FB. I have a online backup solution, crashplan.com, that stores these pictures on the web at another location with a scheduled backup time daily. Disasters come in many sizes. You computer hard drive with the photos could fail, you camera could die with the photos on it, you are not able to download your photos from a backup due to corruption, etc. etc.. Make sure you have more than one solution in place. Dropbox, Google drive, iCloud, Amazon all over cloud storage that allow you to store all types of files at little to no cost, and share them across computers and devices. Personally I find Google drive to be a seamless solution for storing files and pictures. The next thing you need to come up with is a plan that uploads your photos to your computer on a regular basis. Once they are on the computer, the backup will capture your pictures on a scheduled basis. Moving the pictures from your local hard drive to sites like Google, Dropbox and so on require that you manually copy then from your hard drive to the clod drive. (DO NOT CUT THE PICTURES FROM THE FOLDER ON YOUR HARD DRIVE AND MOVE THEM TO CLOUD STORAGE. MAKE SURE YOU KEEP A LOCAL COPY ON YOUR COMPUTER.) This is why the backup is so important. In the event you forget to copy from your computer to the cloud drive, is when things can go bad. With the backup schedule you don't have to worry about losing much data. Just my two cents.
The camera in my phone hasn't worked for awhile so I've been using a regular camera with an SD card. I keep my pics in several places; on an external hosting site(snapfish), on the card, on the computer and on a 500GB external storage drive. I lost about 400 pics a couple years ago to a corrupted SD card and decided it was time to have some backup so it never happened again.
"Yippee! Now you can download all of your most-loved photos from Snapfish at absolutely no charge, at their original full-resolution quality." Good to know. This was not the case when I started using Smugmug.
Google drive does 15GB for free. 100GB for 1.99/month. DropBox does 2GB for free or 9.99/month for 1TB. Amazon Prime has unlimited photo storage plus other benefits such as free two day shipping for $99/year. (I didn't know Amazon Prime had unlimited photos. As I already pay for this for the Prime video, two day shipping and streaming music, this is what I'll be moving my pictures to.) iCloud - if you are iPhone user 200GB is 3.99/month
Have it already Thanks Friend. Everything here is from Amazon with the exception of pershibles that hubby buys at the grocery store. One more use for the same price
Forget the cloud based storages systems. The BIG problem with them is, when you sign up and sign / agree with that 30 pages of fine print that you don't read and simply check the "AGREE" box says THEY OWN ALL OF YOUR STUFF! That means they can do whatever they want with it. Also, the little 22 year old weasels that works at that company (thousands of them!), have full access to YOUR files! Get yourself a NAS device with at least RAID level 1 (mirrored hard disks). It's a little storage device (hard disk) that you plug into your network and it acts like your home storage server. They are really easy to setup and use. I suggest the Buffalo Technology brand, and make sure you get one with 2 disks in it, and supports RAID level 1 (mirroring the two drives). If one disk fails (and they will eventually!), the other still has all you info on it, no loss!! Just replace the bad disk and your back up and running without loosing anything. For home or small offices I like the Linkstation 420's. I put two 2 TeraByte disks in it, and your all set for a long time! http://www.buffalotech.com/products/network-storage Good luck!
Unfortunately you are correct. All of the online storage agreements indicate that they own your data. I've not run into anything that I can for certain. However; as you state it's a concern for some. As for a NAS device, I love it. They are pretty straight forward these days, and you can store you pictures along with everything else. The one piece that it does not take care of is offsite storage. If you disaster is a fire, you've lost all of your pictures. Whether they are on your computer or your NAS device.
What is the difference between NAS and external hard drive (WD My Book)? In my situation I think either of these would work better than uploading somewhere since I won't be eating up the monthly satellite internet gigs on back up. What do you think?
Yep, that is the one risk. You can mitigate it however by backing up the NAS device now and then with a $60 USB portable disk drive that you store elsewhere. The Buffalo drives have built in backup software, you can just plug in a USB drive, and set a schedule in the software (once a day, once a week, once a month or manually...) and it copies all data for you. They are 2 or $300 buck or so, and are really easy to configure / setup since they have a startup wizard for "dummies" that runs and simply asks you a few questions, once answered it configures itself. And no, I have no interest in buffalo drives. But I am an IT guy.
I don't backup our stuff to any type of cloud. We backup all our photos from the camera and important documents from the computer to a 1 tb external hard drive (that is kept in the safe). I just never thought about backing up my phone because the photos were saved on the sd card, not internally. Well somehow the card got wiped out
PLEASE, do yourself a GIANT favor (and that goes for everyone else out there!). "Backing up" to one disk as in your case above, "to a 1 tb external drive" is NOT backing up anything. Your simply copying your stuff from one place, to another place (camera to ext. drive, computer to ext. drive....). Now you need to actually BACKUP those files! Which means, make a 2nd copy of all those files onto another device and stored in a safe place. that other device can simply be another external drive, a NAS device, another computer.... anything. But make sure you have a 2nd copy. This is for 2 reasons: 1. If your 1 tb external drive is damaged, crashes, lost, stolen.... then what? You have lost everything. 2. Often when disks crash, it occurs right in the middle of using it. And you tend to loose everything you were doing. What does that mean? It means you loose all the stuff that was on the disk, and all the stuff you were just transferring to it! Backup all your stuff to a 2nd location guys! This is one reason I really like the dual disk NAS devices like the Buffalo Linkstation 420 with 2 disks in RAID level 1 mode. Your stuff is automatically really "backed up" to 2nd disk. Much safer!
