I've come across several friends and family who have come to me in dire need of some backup help. For whatever reason their hard drives had conked out - some either giving errors during use, or not being able to load Windows at all. In most cases the hard drives were somewhat recoverable . In a day and age where digital picture taking is the norm and 50+ pictures per event is not uncommon, one has to realize that digital files are more susceptible to becoming nothing than are film negatives. I quickly came to that conclusion when the drive where I store my photos on ... along with 200gb of other data went on the blitz. Fortunately that hard drive was part of a mirrored hard drive RAID array and the other drive was holding an exact copy of that data for me.
I quickly realized that those photos from as far back as 1999 were irreplaceable - even if they were taken with a digital brick of a camera called a Kodak DC210 with it's whopping 1megapixel capacity. It was then I started to find an acceptable solution for backing up my precious data.
Websites that offer offsite storage solutions were either too-expensive or at the risk of disappearing tomorrow. External USB hard drives are good but those drives too are prone to errors (as with any hard drive) especially if you get one based on a laptop (2.5 inch) hard drive (I find laptop hard drives do not last as long as 3.5 inch desktop drives).
My final solution? The $24.95 a year Flickr Pro account at www.flickr.com. Those personal photos don't have to be made public to the world ... they can be marked as private if you choose to. Plus, you can give access to view those photos to other family members. Quite handy indeed.
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