In the days of film we took great care of our negatives / slides as we knew how easily they could be scratched or damaged. But what do we do to protect our digital images from loss? Probably not much, we download the images from the cameras memory card and save them to our computers hard disk. We then delete them from the memory card. We have just stored our precious images on the most vulnerable component of our computer - the hard disk, a mechanical device that whizzes round at speeds in excess of 7200 revolutions per minute. It is vulnerable from dust, vibration and just being used.
So what can we do to protect our images from loss?, well a number of things really, the following is a belt and braces (and finally string) process.
If you can afford it and your PC can take one add an extra hard disk, the most likely disk to fail with data corruption is the disk with Windows on it, my PC has 2 hard disks one for Windows and Applications, the other for Data, I don't store data / images on the C: drive.
Keep your images tidily on your hard disk, so you can easily find them again, I always create a new folder for each batch of images.
The first thing to do after downloading to your hard disk is to use Windows Explorer to locate the folder you have just downloaded to, press 'CTRL' + A, this will select all the files, now RIGHT CLICK on the list of selected files, choose PROPERTIES and tick the 'READ ONLY' attribute. You now cannot delete the files (or even edit them - we'll sort that out later).
The next thing to do is to save your folder(s) to a CD, Windows can do this for you, or use a program like Nero or Roxio to burn the CD. If our hard disk fails we will now have a library of CD's with our images on. For the paranoid amongst you, make 2 CD's, as CD's are not entirely free from being able to be damaged.
Another option is to add a USB External Hard Drive and copy your images to this device, this is good as you will have your images available, but remember this is still a hard drive and can fail.
Are CD's good for life?, who knows, they haven't been around long enough to be sure, but it is possible to purchase blank CD's regarded as Archival, some of these claim a life of 300 years. So you could back up multiple folders to CD's of this quality.
There you go the above is the belt and braces, and for the string, well store your Archive CD's in a relatives house - just in case.
What do I do?, well sadly all of the above, I've worked in IT too long to take PC's for granted.
Does all of the above just apply to your digital images, of course not, any data files you store on your computer that you may need in the future need to stored on something else other than the PC's hard drive.
To work on your images in say Photoshop, copy them to a working folder and remove the Read Only Attribute we set earlier. Don't forget to save your edited images to CD as well!!