HOW DO YOU PROTECT YOUR PHOTOS?

[hifi]

have loads on lap top and a little worried if it gets stolen/damaged.have tried to burn them on a disk but says it cant find disk.any other ways of protecting them?

upload them to an online site? i use snapfish

Similar to SEA, I have all mine on flickr - but only available for me not for all and sundry to see, iyswim.

I burn to disk and also upload to flickr.

I actually burn all my files to disk once a month.

You should back things up at least twice and check that the backups have actually worked regularly. There's not much worse than saying "oh I'll go to my backups" only to find out that the online service has shut down or your discs don't work.

We use JungleDisk to back up all the stuff on our computers. It costs a couple of dollars a month and for that we know that all our stuff is safely backed up 'offsite'.

Burning to disks etc is a good start but in the event of eg a housefire they'd still be gone (unless you are good at remembering to eg take them to someone else's house/work etc). In all seriousness, a couple of years ago I was stood in my front garden waiting for the fire brigade to arrive wondering if there was anything I should try to get out of the house...as me and DS were already safe and everything was insured, the only thing I could think of was photos... Whilst I wouldn't have gone back in for them (not even baby pics are worth dying for!) it was a soothing moment when I realised that they were all safe in the Amazon 'cloud'.

we have ours on an external harddrive, but also copied to dp's work laptop which lives in his office

thanks,will look into it.

There's a fantastic tool called Dropbox (easily found on Google) which acts as an online extension of your computer's hard drive, and you can choose to share certain folders with other people - we use it to allow the grandparents access to all our photos of DS.

I put some on Facebook, some on Photobucket and all on a Seagate external hard drive that is very well hidden but easy to reach in case of fire

We have a Seagate external hard disc too, mainly because I was paranoid our PC would be stolen while we were on holiday.

We back it up manually every so often (I know you can get back up programmes, but it isn't very hard to do).

I upload to facebook, windows live (free 25gb storage) and back up on a hard drive, learnt the hard way after computer broke how important My photos are to me!

flickr

We:

• have external harddisk for backups
• Print some off and have them in albums
• Have some uploaded to a blog that is shared with family
• Have some uploaded to facebook

A couple of things to comment on...

Unless you have a Flikr Pro account, I believe flikr only let you store a limited number of pictures in your own profile. Although pictures you share wilth groups are not limited (so create a private group and make sure you put all your photo's in it). I can't remember if there was resolution limits as well.

Facebook seems to reduce the resolution of pictures that are uploaded. I've never got a high rez photo out again at the same resolution as I put it in.

We have an external harddrive and use Time Machine (mac software that comes with the OS) that backs up any changes every hour.

We also use Mozy as online storage - but our internet connection is unbelievably slow so wouldn't rely on that on its own.

A lot of our better photos are on Flickr, so if we lost everything we'd still have our favourite ones available.

In fact, Time Machine has been a lifesaver when my hard drive died. It had just finished backing up latest changes six minutes before the drive stopped working. I lost nothing, managed to map everything onto another computer and carry on working, then put everything back once my iMac was returned with shiny new hard drive.

we too have an external hard drive, however, it is in the house so in the event of a house fire and the computer, and laptop were gone, the external hard drive would also go so it hs made me have a think! thank you