Yesterday I had a surreal experience. I had to drive to three locations in London, returning work to one and collecting from the others. When I got home I saw TV images of damage to police cars at a junction I’d driven past a couple of hours ago. Then substantial fire damage in a block in Clapham where another of our clients work.
I just don’t think I live and work in areas at the mercy of fire raisers and looters, this is London in the 21st century. But it’s clear how people have suffered, and how much distress people suffer when they lose precious possessions. I have ben struck how high up the list the loss of family photos has been for people in Hackney and Tottenham. What we we do to protect our own memories?
First, it helps to get your photos into a digital format. In physical form 4,000 photos fills a good sized box, once scanned these photos (scanned in high quality) would fit onto a DVD. That disc is easier to store and copy, so a duplicate can be held off-site.
If you have a large number of scanned photos you’d be thinking of storing them on a hard drive. As we’ve seen all too vividly, you need to have your digital image files copied onto a backup of that hard drive, and here’s the point, stored safely off-site. Certainly you could make an arrangement with a friend or relative to store your backup and it’s an improvement. You should also give thought to a professional off-site file backup service. We’ve used Apple’s MobileMe service (soon to be replaced) and Dropbox, both have worked well for us. A couple of weeks ago I signed up for a remote version of Apple’s Timemachine called DollyDrive. This gives me a complete backup of my machine which is stored “in the cloud” so if I should lose my hard drive, or even my MacBook, there’s a complete copy of my system held out of harms way.
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