How to Protect Your Memories

Your son is getting married and you want to gift him with an album full of his childhood photos so that he has it for his own family. Problem is, your computer crashed and the hard drive you had some of the photos on became corrupt. So what do you do?

Grandpa & I
Summer Memories

A few years ago I wrote a blog post for my professional portrait business. It is still relevant today so I’ll post the information that pertains to the iPhone. Originally posted on the Andrea Rees Photography Blog May 11, 2009.

August 2019 — updated with current relevant information

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While working on a blog post, a tv commercial came on that caught my attention. It’s a funny commercial that starts with a boy posing in a crib while his parents are taking a picture of him on their digital camera. The boy is about 11 years old and they are recreating his childhood in photos because his father dropped his laptop and lost the originals.  While it was a comical look at the situation that I’m sure has happened to you or at least, one person you know, the commercial’s intent was to promote their online storage services.

As a photographer, backup is very important and I make every effort to backup and archive the images I create.  My husband is in IT so I’m very lucky as he helps me come up with the best solution.

So the question is… how do you protect photos of your loved ones or of your travels?

External Hard Drives

While this is a great option if you’re travelling with a laptop, hard drives do crash. Let me repeat that. They do crash. I’ve had two external hard drives fail on me. Luckily, I had the images backed up in multiple ways so I didn’t lose anything. One hard drive crashed within 1 week of purchase. The other hard drive was about 1-2 years old.

When I travel I don’t rely on cloud storage solutions and use one of these backup scenarios:

I travel with several 128 GB SD cards as well and don’t delete images off my iPhone or SD cards until they have been transferred and backed up. It really depends on the type of travel I am doing and if I need to travel light. I don’t rely on cloud storage on my travels simply for cost as well as the internet can be unreliable.

USB drive or iFlashDrive

These little things are great for mobility, but they are meant for temporary storage so please don’t rely on them alone, they can crash too. As I said above, I travel with 2 storage solutions.

  • An iFlash Drive. If you travel with an iPhone and an iPad or laptop this is the tech accessory for you. I often transfer my iPhone photos to my iPad mini to edit and for storage, especially if I’m travelling without a laptop, reliable internet or data.

This device will allow me to transfer photos to my iPad mini, but back again to my iPhone after editing. It works with videos and documents too. It really has been a great time saver and allows me to travel lighter when I need to. The one pictured below is no longer available in my photography stores or on Amazon, so I did some research and found something similar with good reviews.

iFlash Drive
iFlash Drive, 30-pin, I now have a lightning iFlashDrive

Online storage and/or Backup

I believe this is the best solution for most people. I use a Flickr Pro account for my original and edited images and videos, it gives me unlimited storage for about $45 USD/year. The free Flickr option gives you 1000gb of storage. I use Dropbox or Box.net for files and documents.

I also use Crashplan to automatically backup the files on my home server.

Mirrored drive and RAID servers

This is what we have in place at home. I don’t want to get technical on you especially since I don’t fully know the details, but simply it’s a way to replicate your data. For example, say you have your photos and data stored on one drive, mirrored drives and raid allow you to have an exact copy of that on another drive should the first drive fail. You will need someone with the knowledge to set this up for you. It might be overkill for most people, but if you take A LOT of photos or if you are a small business it might be something you should consider.

Hope this helps or at the very least gives you something to think about.

Until next time,

Andrea… and my wandering iPhone

Andrea is a professional travel and portrait photographer, photography educator, founder of The Heart of a Woman Project, a women's mobile photography initiative and publisher of wanderingiPhone.com. Andrea began her photography career in 2003 in Toronto, Canada. Her work has been featured on CBC, W Network, Splice Network and in national and international print and digital magazines including Shutterbug magazine.