Archiving Your Memories

There has been a lot of talk lately about the best way to store your personal photos, videos and documents. Nearly everyone on the planet has these assets and most of us don't have a solid plan on how we are going to keep these for the future. Do you?

The most common options are hard drives, online storage vaults and optical discs. Each of these solutions has merit and should be considered when developing your own storage plan. Most of us initially transfer pictures from our cameras directly to the hard drives on our computers. Unfortunately too many people stop right there. What happens if your computer is stolen? Your house burns down? And the big "if, not when" your hard drive fails?

• Rule # 1 ALWAYS have two copies of your important files.
  
• Rule #2 The second copy needs to be at a different location than the first copy.
  
• Rule # 3 Remember where you put the backup and tell someone else.
  

Rule #1 sounds easy and basic right? It is easy but it takes discipline and time to make it happen. If you have a horror story to tell, please post it. If you have a happy story, please post that too. We all need to be more diligent with this, it's important. Take the time today to start making your plan to back up.

Rule #2 is common knowledge to any decent IT person but often overlooked by personal users until they have a bad story to tell. You have to consider the possibility of fire and theft. Be sure to keep a copy at your office or the house of a friend or relative.

Rule # 3 is really easy to cover if you use optical media as your storage solution. Once you have made your archival copies, give one to a family member. This way if something bad happens to you the discs will be harder to miss. There is some risk to using an online storage facility because you may be the only person who knows it exists.

We will dig deeper into optical media solutions in upcoming posts. The various types of CD, DVD and BluRay discs will be looked at and each one will be scrutinized. This is something we have been involved with for a long time and can offer much expertise regarding this. We welcome any posts about other alternative storage methods as our intention is to inform and educate the general public about how to best preserve their family memories.