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Backing up your Digital Photos

Since the introduction of the first consumer digital cameras in the early 1990s, the market for digital photography has grown tremendously. With prices dropping every month and with image quality approaching the quality of traditional film cameras, digital cameras are now becoming more popular than traditional cameras and are expected to completely replace film- based cameras over the next ten years. With a digital camera and a modern PC, you can easily store hundreds or thousands of photos. While this new technology makes it a lot easier to take and store pictures, depending on a single piece of hardware is not without risks.

Digital Media and Reliability
Most PC users have probably experienced at least a few technical problems while using their computers. These problems range from minor problems like programs crashing to the more serious problems such as virus attacks, lost files, and hard disk crashes. Because of these problems, a PC is not the most reliable place to store valuable information. Corporate users have known about these problems for decades and are often well prepared with secure servers, tape backups, and good routines. Home users, on the other hand, usually don't have expensive storage servers and rarely make any regular backups until it's too late. If you only use your computer to send emails, write text, or play games, a disk failure or virus attack might be annoying and cost you a few hours of work. If you use your computer to store all your family photos, a disk crash could be a total disaster. Unlike most other information on a computer, photos are usually supposed to be stored for decades. While hard drives might last this long, their contents usually don't. Due to disk crashes, hardware upgrades, viruses, and other problems, most of the files stored on a hard drive will last only for a few years. If you want to keep your photos, the only solution is to make backup copies.

Creating Backups on Regular Basis
The key to avoiding all kinds of technical disasters is being well prepared. When it comes to digitally-stored photos, being well prepared means creating backups on a regular basis. With CD writers costing only a few hundred dollars, storing backups on CDs or CDRWs are probably the best backup solution for most home users. To create backups on a regular basis, you should also use backup software that allows you to run backups very easily or schedule automatic backups. WinBackup offers both ease of use and all the features you need to quickly create CD or DVD backups of all your digital photos. Using WinBackup, you can also access your photos directly from the backup file, making it easy to browse a backup for a particular picture or folder. WinBackup's built-in scheduler also makes it easy to schedule automatic backups of new or changed files.

Click Here to Backup Your Photos with WinBackup 2.0