18 January 2011
A survey conducted in UK in October 2010 revealed that of all the possessions people worry most about losing, it is photos. People are more afraid of losing pictures than even their purses or handbags.
Pictures are irreplaceable. They represent who we were and where we’ve been. We can replace lost keys and phones but nothing can take the place of lost photos. Once they’re lost, they’re lost forever—except in our imaginations which, unfortunately, we can never share with anybody.
Pictures of you when you got married, that picture of your wife as she was delivering your baby, those first shots of your newborn child, birthday party pictures or graduation pictures—these are visual records of our emotional moments and significant milestones. We would give anything just to keep them.
Digital photography has made picture-taking easy and cheap. Unfortunately, losing pictures with this technology is almost as easy as taking them.
The advent of digital photography has created a surge of picture-taking and digital photography has made picture-taking easy and cheap. Unfortunately, losing pictures with this technology is almost as easy as taking them.
Hard drive failure, accidentally dropping your digital camera, getting your camera phone wet, accidental deletion and memory card-related errors are all causes for losing digital pictures. It is important, then, to have a good backup system to prevent loss of all your photos, to have a picture recovery software in the event of their loss and to have a data recovery company to go to in case recovery of lost pictures is simply beyond you.
Professional photographer John Need, whose livelihood depends on the integrity of his clients’ pictures, offers the following advice in preventing data loss:
- Copy your pictures to an external hard drive and label by year and event.
- Sign up with an online backup service provider so that when something happens to your external hard drive (or your home), you still have an off-site backup.
- Back-up your photos onto 2 DVD-R’s. In case one DVD-R gets corrupted, the other can be used. You may also opt to store these DVD’s off-site or outside of your home.
In case you lose your pictures from your mobile camera phone or digital camera, you can recover them using any of the above backups—external hard drive, online backup and DVD-R’s.
