Protect Your Photos
By Brian Auer • March 10th, 2007The more photos I take, the more worried I get. I have over 18,000 photos from the last 4 years on an external hard drive, including every photo I’ve ever taken of my children. Now if something were to happen to that hard drive, I’d be at quite a loss. I back-up every six months or so on DVD and place them in a fireproof safe, but I still feel like it’s not enough. What if my hard drive crashes? What if the house burns down and the DVDs melt inside the safe? What if somebody breaks into my house and steals the safe and the computer? These are the things that I worry about when it comes to my photos.
So today I finally signed up for ProtectMyPhotos so that I can rest a little easier. This is a service that backs up your photos online. It’s pretty cheap ($40/year), and they give you up to 40GB of space — they say unlimited, but you’ll have to pay another $40/year for going much over 40GB. I’ve got 42GB, so I’ll probably end up paying the extra fee. Even so, it’s not a bad deal at all.
After you sign up for the service, you download a piece of software that is installed on your computer. This software allows you to choose which folders will be backed up and “watched” for any changes. The software loads up when your computer starts and runs silently in the background, either uploading your pictures to their server or watching your folders for new photos. It also gives priority to other software you might be using so that it doesn’t bog your computer or your Internet connection down. Once your photos are uploaded, you can go to their website and login to see your photos, download them, or restore them if something happens to your local copies.
In addition to the standard JPEG, the software backs-up RAW files, Photoshop files, TIFF files, movie files, and a few other types of files. It even uploaded my Picasa.ini files! It takes a while for the initial upload (I’m at 4% after 4 or 5 hours with a cable connection), but subsequent backups should be pretty quick.
My only complaint so far is that the software doesn’t recognize my .JPE files from my Maxxum 7D as JPEGs — it only sees the .JPG, .JPEG, and .JP2 files. I’ve contacted them about this. Hopefully they’ll be able to do something for me. Other than that, it’s a great service. So if you’ve got a few thousand photos on your hard drive that you couldn’t stand to part with, check it out. ProtectMyPhotos
Photo of the Day…
Photo by Brian Auer
03/05/07 Neuchatel, Switzerland
Orange Wall Graffiti
Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D
Konica Minolta AF DT 18-200
30mm equiv * f/4.5 * 1/45s * ISO100
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from San Diego, California. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
Visit the author's homepage | View all Epic Edits posts by Brian Auer
hmm, interesting service. I don’t have as many photos as you do, plus my p&s camera doesn’t shoot in RAW format, but you’ve reminded me that I have to back up my gigabytes of photos as well.
Hey, I like this new look of your blog
Thanks for the compliment on the blog layout. I was actually surprised at how quickly I got it changed over with no real problems — although it doesn’t hurt when you’re fluent in HTML and PHP.
The service you talk about sounds real good, however what would you suggest I use givin the fact that I don’t have fast internet. I need to come up with a reasonable way to protect my pictures. I have about the same amount as you do. And am adding to that more each day.
Slow internet sucks doesn’t it? I suggest you move to a location that actually offers cable or DSL. But if you refuse to move, at least buy an external hard drive (about 250GB) and set it up as a mirror drive to your photo folder on your main drive. That way you don’t have to manually copy your photos to the backup drive — it will be done automatically.