subject: Digital photography: Backup strategies to protect your images [print this page] Digital photography: Backup strategies to protect your images
People often complain about losing cherished images due to hard disk failure or damaged memory cards. They could have safeguarded themselves from such unfortunate situations provided they had taken some wise steps. You cannot trust digital media, they are always susceptible to failure. Moreover anything from a human error to power surge, to a virus attack can wipe out your image files. Therefore, it is important to consider the various ways to backup and organize your valuable digital images. This way you keep yourself safe from data disasters and remain assured of the digital image recovery.
Different backup strategies
It is must for both professional and novice photographers to maintain regular backup copies of images. However, archiving photos to a CD or DVD, and then deleting them from the hard disk of your computer is not a backup copy. The following steps will make you familiar with different backup strategies:
Transfer images from memory cards or sticks: As soon as you wind up a shoot, transfer your images to your computer's/laptop's hard disk. You can use an external hard disk or USB to maintain an extra copy of the images.
Backup to CDs or DVDs: After you transfer images to a computer/laptop, take blank CDs/DVDs and burn your images onto them. You can create two-three copies for a single set of digital images
Online storage places: If you are Internet savvy, then backup your images to various online photo storage websites like Flickr, Snapfish, Picasa etc. Also, make sure the storage website supports large-sized files.
Drive mirroring: You can select from various programs to make an exact copy of the all the digital images and other content of your hard drive. The process can be done either manually or automatically. The image of the files can be taken and preserved on a DVD, CD, another hard drive or across a network.
As seen, there are many backup options available. You can make a robust backup scheme of your own by choosing convenient options. If and ever you accidentally delete or lose images, you can easily perform digital image recovery from an updated backup.
What if backup fails or is unavaiable?
There can be many instances when you might not have a clean backup or backup itself gets corrupt or there is no backup at all. In such situations, you can completely rely on a third-party digital image recovery software.
Such tools employ improved scanning algorithms and recover images from various storage media, irrespective of the data loss scenario.
Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is a comprehensive software which recovers lost or deleted images and other multimedia files from memory cards, memory sticks, hard drives, USBs and other removable media. This digital image recovery software is available for both Windows and Mac operating systems.
