Today is the last of the not-so-fun tedious Spring Cleaning blog posts, I promise!

If you are just joining us you can catch up on the series here:

Today we are going to protect our valuable images by making sure that they are backed up properly.

If you ask most people what they would save if their house caught on fire they will tell you they would save their photos.

Your photos represent years of precious, irreplacable memories.  Ensuring their safety is essential.

The general rule of thumb when it comes to backing up your images is that they should be stored in a minimum of two places, including off site storage.

Let’s be real, harddrives fail all the time.  No, seriously.  I have had at least three major harddrive fails since I started my photography business in 2009.

If you are not dilligently backing up your images you stand to lose years of memories!

The best way to make sure you images are safe is to have mirrored harddrives.  This means that you buy two identical harddrives and store and sync all of the same information onto both drives.

I use external harddrives from Western Digital to keep my laptop harddrive free.

If you use a Mac you can use time machine to backup your harddrive automatically, you can download backup software, or you can manually copy your files from one harddrive to the other.

Lightroom allows you to automatically make a backup of all of your files on import which makes it super easy.  Then you just have to go back later and copy over the edited Jpegs.

I also like to burn a copy of the final jpegs onto a DVD and put it into my client file.  This way I have two copies on my harddrives and a physical copy in each file.

On to offsite storage.

Offsite storage can mean that you send a DVD of all of your images to your mom to keep or her house or that you upload your files to a cloud server online.

Online storage can get pricey, but if you use a photo hosting service (I use Smugmug) many of them will allow you to upload unlimited amount of jpeg files to online galleries for the cost of your monthly hosting fee.

Be sure to check if they will let you download the files from their online server for free or if there is a fee associated with downloading the files again.

Once you have you photos all backup up and safe give yourself a high five.  You just ensured your memories will be safe for years to come!