The dull days of winter are upon us. Now that the Super Bowl is over there is not much happening until March Madness, but that seems sooooo far away. Or perhaps sports are just not your thing. Now would be a good time to backup your digital files.
Most consumers don’t have a backup plan for their photos. In the ancient days of film you had the negatives and probably got the two for one prints. So there was some level of safety by duplication. But what should be done with digital files?
1. Organize your images. Create a file on your hard drive named PHOTOS. Within that create files by date or name. Each year I have a Driggers Photos file for my personal photos. Within that I may have a file for birthdays, holidays and vacations. Use titles that you can easily identify the contents within that folder.
2. Save original quality files. You may have cropped, enhanced or changed the size of an image in order to email to a friend or relative. Remember, sizes that are ideal for display on a computer monitor are not designed for quality printing. You want to maintain the largest possible size in order to have access to quality prints.
3. Burn Baby Burn! OK, you’ve got to be of a certain age to know that phrase. But burn copies of your folders to DVD’s and portable hard drives. If you suffer from computer phobia and don’t know how to burn a disk, no problem. Just a simple drag and drop, but rather than get into the fine detail, call an expert to help. This is any child age 6 or older. Seriously, they can do this for you and all they need is some candy as payment.
4. Go to the cloud. Cloud services are where your data is saved by another company, protected by your password, off site. Some of these include Carbonite, iCloud, skydrive and others.
COMING SOON – Creating cell phone art for your home decor.
