Hey you!  I see you sitting there at your computer.  I can also see that you have a hard drive full of snapshots of your sweet children.  I bet you also haven’t had any of them printed out, so they are just sitting there on your computer and no one can see them.  Print them out!  Put them in a album or a scrapbook. 

Ok the real point of my post today is that I want to urge you to back up your photos.  I have several different back up methods for my personal photos and for all of my client files to be sure that if my computers ever crashed that I would be well protected and not lose anything.  I have multiple external hard drives, I burn cds and dvds so I’m well covered.

The most IMPORTANT thing that I do is that I back up all of my files offsite.  I use a service called mozy.com and every night when I’m done using my computer Mozy goes in and backs up everything to their servers.  Why in the world would I want to do this if I have externals and dvds?  Well in case of theft, fire, or if I lost them, they are always waiting for me right there on Mozy.  This must be expensive right? Nope nope it’s not, for home users like you it’s only $5 a month for UNLIMITED backup (what? unlimited, yes unlimited!)  It doesn’t just back up image files, you can backup everything on your computer.

Please please back up your files, I’ve had way too many friends experience computer crashes and they have lost all of their photos of their children’s birthdays, special moments, activities, etc.

With most of the back up services the initial backup will take about 1 day less than forever, because if you are like me you have a gazillion files sitting there.  After that it only takes a little time each night and you can schedule it for a time when you are not using the computer.

Another thing I do is backup JPEG images to flickr.com.  For $25 a year (which is insanely cheap) you can get a flickr pro account with unlimited storage and upload all of your images in hi-res format to flickr.  You can set them to private so no one else but you can see them, you can even use their printing service to kill two birds with one stone.  You can invite family and friends to view photos as well on a flickr guest pass.

Now you don’t have to be as insane as I am and have your data backed up all over the place like I do, but please please back it up to something offsite and away from your home.  If your computer ever crashes, which most of them eventually do, you will thank me!  I have a few friends who use carbonite.com to back up, I’ve never tried it but I hear it’s a great program as well!  Anything is better than not backing up!

Ok so this post isn’t so boring, I’ll throw in a couple of totally unrelated images, but at least you have something to look at to go along with all of my bossy requests for you to back up your computers! ;-)  Both shots are San Pedro, CA at night…