The first part of my scrapbooking happiness project involves boosting energy. The first way I boosted my energy was by backing up my digital photos. So simple. So easy. Rarely done. I always think, “well, I’ll just have to back them up again in a month, I’ll just wait until then to do it” and then it never gets done.
How you back up your digital photos depends on what you currently have available. I used to just store my digital photos in folders on my desktop with such inconsistent names as: Summer 2006, New York City 2007, Family 2005, December 2007, and so on. I then learned about Creative Memories software called Memory Manager. I now organize and do some basic editing of my digital photos in Memory Manager. I like it because it is easy to use and can be set up to create a shadow copy of all of your photographs. I have been using Memory Manager for about two years and have only once made a shadow copy. I decided it was time. I dug out my external hard drive from our fire-proof safe and tried it out. In the process, I deleted all of my photos…some 8,000 photos. Oops. Or so I thought. I tried recovering as many as I could from the various other folders I save photos to (Memory Manager isn’t perfect or it could be user error, but I have the following types of folders outside of Memory Manager: facebook photos, photos to print, photos to email, photos for this project, photos for that project). I recovered many of them that way and I had just placed an order for prints and had not deleted my camera’s memory card (I only do that once it is full). Worse things have happened. A couple days later, I finally had a chance to call Creative Memories to see if they had a fix. Within one minute all of my photos had been recovered. Well, they were never really gone. I just didn’t know how to use all the buttons in the software program. Anyway, now to back them all up to that external hard drive.
Done. I have decided I need to do this at least three times a year. I have set-up a reminder in Google Calendar to email me when it is time to back-up my photographs. You might want to back your photos up more or less frequently. It depends on how often you take photographs, order prints, and so on.
Some of you may wonder why back your photos up at all. I would be devastated if I lost all my photos. If they are backed up somewhere, then I can get more prints made. Don’t trust whatever service you use to print your photos to safely store digital copies. What if they go out of business? Some of these companies require you to make a purchase every so often in order to maintain copies. In other words, if you want your photos backed up, do it yourself.
Stephanie Medley-Rath is a sociologist and scrapbooker who studies scrapbooking and memory keeping. Scrapworthy Lives is a blog focused on her sociological analysis of scrapbooking, with a sprinkling of posts about Stephanie's own scrapbooking projects.
