Our greatest fear as memory keepers is losing our most precious photos. That is just universal. But what do you protect first? Which media types leave them more vulnerable than others?

We all have USBs, external hard drives, prints, CDs, DVDs, cloud services, computers etc etc.

Coming off a recent discussion in a pro-organising group, the consensus was that your DVDs and CDs are probably the most likely to be rendered useless as one little scratch can make them unplayable. Was that the media you would have guessed?

Most people guessed USBs when I posed this question to my group.

Prints can be destroyed by water or fire. Or simply lost and damaged by age. However, I really think digital media is more susceptible to being lost, deleted or corrupted.

Just think, you have most likely moved albums and boxes and boxes of photos from house to house, but have probably lost photos that have been on USBs, or external hard drives simply because we can’t physically touch them.

Of course, external drives can fail, and cloud services can fail as well.
Sound like doomsday doesn’t it?

But it doesn’t have to be. If I were to prioritise with all photos being equally important (which they aren’t of course) but if they were, I would get a digital backup made of my CDs and DVDs first and then fully back up my digital collection.

Then worry about prints and USBs.

It’s a lot to worry about frankly, but if you can set up a fail-safe backup system you will worry ALOT less.

That is my 2 cents for the day!

And if you want to learn more about creating a fail-safe backup, you can check out this 60-minute Workshop called Backup Basics.