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Easy Ways to Preserve Your Holiday Photos

27.12.2010
We all take more photos than usual at this time of year. You might be taking , , or just . No matter what the subject, I'm reminded about just how important your photo collection actually is. These are treasured memories, and you don't want to trust decades of images to a finicky magnetized platter that spins at 7,000 rpm and, as it ages, could fail catastrophically. I don't mean to scare you, but it's a fact of life: All computer gear breaks eventually, and it's important to have a backup of your photos when that inevitable day comes. So with that in mind, I've rounded up some easy ways to back up your photos to guard against calamity.

Actually, I'm kidding. Back in the day, floppy disks were the most common way to back up your files, but they've been mercifully obsolete for many years now. I hope that bringing these relics up doesn't date me too badly--but in my defense, last year my dad asked me if using floppies was a practical backup strategy for his photos. That's when I pointed out to him that my last few computers didn't even come with floppy drive bays (which makes it all the stranger that I have a stack of floppies still stacked neatly on a shelf, "just in case").

The most common floppy disks have a capacity of 1.44MB, which means that you'd need a stack of about 700 floppies to store all the photos on just a single 8GB Secure Digital card.

So if a mountain of floppy disks won't do the trick, what other options do you have?