Warning, please, please back up your photos.

[vixen]

I have thousands of photographs.  They are all on my computer, carefully stored in different folders.  They are very precious to me and irreplaceable.  I have photos of departed loved ones that mean so much to me. I have always been comforted by the fact that I have a iBook and Macs seldom go wrong.    My daughter did have problems with her pc last year which did lead me to back up some of my folders.
BUT things do go wrong even with good systems    For the past two weeks I have had terrible problems with iPhoto.  When I try to view items from my library and old folders, new images keep overlaying them somehow.  I click on one photo and a different one pops up  
Well, thank goodness for the precautions I took last year and that I backed up my favourite photos onto an external hard drive. I am now able to upload them and so far they have not been affected with whatever is infecting the originals. I still have problems with viewing my general library but the favourites are safe.
So this is a plea to other members.  I would hate you to lose your irreplaceable memories so please, please back them up, don't just rely on your computer. It is also much better to back them up on an external hard drive as discs have a limited life before the data disintegrates.
Today seems like it is going to be a rainy day, so perhaps you could spend a little time saving all those important photos.  

[Toni-UK]

I agree,my OH got a new laptop and was in the process of transfering all the folders with photos in on to it.
The new laptop went wrong within two hours (software fault) it had to be sent back,where they completely wiped it back to the original settings  .

He didn't tell me for ages that my oh so precious photos of our sons uni graduation day were some of the first he had transferred  they weren't the bog standard shot of son with scroll in hand they were group shots of all of us,and family shots of the celebratory meal afterwards,around 100 in total.

To say i was upset was an understatement,he hadn't backed them up when i had kept asking him to do so,he was moaning he had lost photos too,poor him,losing pics of bearded dragons,gecko's and suchlike that he had bred,well i'd lost pics of a HUMAN i'd bred,i think that's more important  .

My other son (not the one in the pics) has thousands of pics on a huge external hard drive,while browsing he found the uni graduation pics,i was ecstatic 

So like the OP said,take a few minutes to back up your precious pics,i was lucky,you might not be.

[Laura]

I learnt about the importance of backing up recently. I'm my case it wasn't photos but documents. My PC went pear-shaped and I thought I'd lost all my uni work - including my dissertation that was due to be handed in that I had been working on for months fortunately after a lot of panic and tears, the problem was a corrupt registry file, which we got sorted.  Lesson learnt 

[seaangler]

You should  back up every time you down load Picts on to your computer ..Thats what it is there for..Just in case your computer has a tantrum(CRASH) In other words....as well as saveing all my pictures in folders...I put them on a web site to store them for me (pascaley) so all my pichutres and Vidio cam stuff are safe and i can get at them very quickly ....Either that buy an external hardrive and store them on you hard drive....(as you have quoted)

[lindseyp]

very good advice Vicki    ...you just never know when your computer might fail 

Luckily my OH bought me an external hard drive for mothers day - my thoughts at the time were 'what a naff present'    but hearing tales such as these, make me glad I recieved it & regularly copy anything important to me 

[Mel]

My advice, as a computer geek, is double back up, always. Always to external hard drives. So you have one set on your pc/mac, a back up copy and a third copy which you just update along with the other exhd. There is always the likelihood of a computer crash which somehow corrupts the plugged in ex. hd., so having a third copy is useful.

Seagate drives are particularly good, and not too expensive, either.

[Sharon]

After losing loads of my pictures last year, I now have them on my computer, backed up on an ext hard drive, and the ext hard drive backed up on another ext hard drive, I'm taking no chances!

[Manster62]

As well as backing up to external drives - I also back-up to an online storage (cloud) server. There are a few companies that provide online storage - usually for a small monthly fee - but the peace of mind it gives me, knowing that all my documents are stored 'off site, means that - should the worst happen - and we had a house fire or burglary - I could still get my photos and personal documents back. Always better to be safe than sorry 

[JeffandAnnie]

Back up everything! I lost my hard drive a few years ago - all gone  I paid £80 for a local IT person to retrieve it; he said he tried everything (including putting it in the freezer  ) but nothing got it back. I still have the hard drive if anyone has any other ideas