Hi and welcome to Over the Moon. This month I’m joining in on a month-long blogging project created by The Nester, you can find the rest of the participants at 31 Days. This is day nineteen of 31 days of Craft Storage Ideas. Storage is at a premium in our little cottage and unfortunately I don’t have a craft space of my own. One day, I’ll turn one of the bedrooms into my studio.
Digital Scrapbooking
I must confess. My digital files are a mess. A Truly Terrible Mess!
As an occasional Digital Scrapbooker this is a big no-no. It takes me such a long time to find the photos I want and the digital files I want to use I often give up in frustration. I also live in fear of loosing my photos and the scrapbooking files that I paid for.
SO, after much research I am going to share with you the way I’m going to organise and back up my files and photos.
Where am I going to back them up?
Keeping all your files on your computer hard drive is fine, as long as your 110% confident that your computer is bullet-proof. No computer virus will get to you, no power surge will fry your hard drive or a catastrophic system failure will leave you helpless. Feeling nervous yet? NO COMPUTER IS 100% SAFE for your file storage.
Here’s what I have chosen to do.
- Organise my digital photos and graphics files (more about that over the next couple of days)
- Monthly back ups on to a CD/DVD. One to keep at home and another to store at my sister’s house. I clearly mark the CD’s with the month and year, and important events like birthdays or weddings. I also create a quick reference document on my computer that tells me which CD’s have important photos.
- A full backup of all my digital photos and files to an external hard drive. I have a 500gb hard drive just for this purpose.
- And finally, back ups in the cloud. I store a copy of my photos in my Google Drive account and copies of my scrapbooking files in Dropbox. You can sync these accounts with your computer once a month.
After I’ve done this I’ll delete all but the most recent photos from my computer. Scary, I know, but remember I have copies on CD, on external hard drive and in the cloud. If the hard drive fails I can restore it from the CD’s or the cloud, if I don’t have internet access I have the CD’s and external hard drive – you get the idea. Because I live in a high risk bushfire prone area saving my photos won’t be a concern because their stored in the cloud and at my sister’s house.
You might think this is overkill, and it probably is. I might consider leaving out the external hard drive and just going with the CD’s and cloud storage.
If you’ve found other ideas for digital storage let me know in the comments or by using the contact link at the top of the page.
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Coming tomorrow…Photo and File Organisation
Hi Karen, I know exactly what you mean by it being “scary” to delete photos from anywhere :) I download them from phone and camera and then it says “Delete from phone/camera” and I always say No, Keep them! I am fast running out of space and heading for disaster! Good idea to keep a copy somewhere else as in with your sister. Timely reminders! Will look forward to tomorrow’s post.