Friday, January 30, 2009

Digital Photos -- Back Them Up

Like most Americans today, we have the last 6 or 7 years worth of our photos in digital format. It is great to be able to send them to people, print them, add them to digital albums, etc...

Something we all take for granted, though, is that computer hardware does fail. Whether or not we have planned for it, drives go bad (or worse, things get stolen). We have a network attached hard drive that contains 80 GB of photos, videos, and documents. The drive is getting old; we've been looking at an upgrade for close to 8 or 9 months. In the meantime, I have copies of some stuff stashed in other spots.

During my search for the right hardware to upgrade to, I came across Mozy. Mozy offers up to 2 GB of free online storage (no credit card required). If you have more to store -- and most of us do -- you can go with the unlimited storage package for $4.95/month. Even with the economy in the tank and people tightening spending, we'd all feel heart stricken if we lost our photo libraries. $60 is a cheap insurance policy...

I think that will be our interim solution. The service basically mirrors your files. So, if you accidentally delete something, you can get it back for up to 30 days. Beyond that, you're out of luck. It works on both Windows and Macs, and will back up any attached (Windows) or mounted (Mac) drive.

Our long term solution will include local backup software and dual (mirrored) drives. Hopefully we'll get to that in the next few months.

Have a happy day!

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