Scenario One:

You have a family computer dedicated for everything from e-mail to downloading your digital pictures. One day, you go to turn it on, but nothing happens.  Your hard drive has crashed. You take it to your local computer guru only to find out that everything is GONE. Not one thing can be recovered from your damaged hard drive. This could happen for a number of reasons; a virus, a power surge, faulty equipment, overheating, or even a spilled drink on the cpu. There are times when files can be recovered from your hard drive, but it can cost thousands of dollars. In this case, having everything backed up onto an external hard drive would have saved you from the heartache (and headache) of losing all of your pictures and important documents you stored on your computer. External hard drives are relatively inexpensive and very easy to use. Many models  offer automatic backup so you don’t even have to think about it. But be aware that external hard drives can fail as well, so they should not be your only source of file backup. Which leads me on to scenario # two.

Scenario Two

Imagine this: it’s 1:00 am and your fire alarm goes off. You quickly jump out of bed and gather your family to head outside and you see flames shooting from the lower level of your home. You had no time to grab anything- no shoes, no personal belongings, and certainly not your computer hard drive which houses thousands of your pictures from the past five years. The fire fighters arrive, but nothing could be saved. A horrible scenario, I know. But IT HAPPENS. This is one of the reasons why  you should use an online backup service for your digital files and documents as well. An online service will automatically save the files you tell it to on their servers. Should a catastrophe with your hard drive occur, you can simply download all of your saved documents onto your new computer.

You can also burn your images to dvd’s, and please, please print them out (more on that in a later blog post). Here are a few hard drives you can order- they are totally affordable and worth every penny.

Lacie 1 tb external hard drive

Western Digital My Passport for a portable solution

And for your online backup- Carbonite.com

Backblaze.com

Don’t put this off. Just do it today, because catastrophes are never planned.

The post Backup, Backup, Backup!!! {Central PA Professional Photographers} appeared first on Shannon Confair Photography.

• First, create a folder for your images titled Family Pictures.
• Second,  create a folder for the year (2011)
• Third, create a folder for each month of the year. I suggest the following format: 2011-01; 2011-02; 2011-03; etc….. This way the folders will appear in chronological order
• Fourth, in each monthly folder you can further organize with a folder for each event

For some of you this may seem obvious, but hopefully this will help at least one person out there Next week I’ll share information on backing up your digital files. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for future “photography 101″ posts please leave them in the comment section below. Thanks for reading!

The post Photography 101: Organizing Your Digital Files appeared first on Shannon Confair Photography.