Baby’s Got Back (up)

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I knew I should have backed up all those photos!

You all sure know how to come through on the organizational advice. If this wasn’t my own blog I would bookmark it just based on all the good stuff you came up with for organizing my life and my photos. Now if someone would just come over to cook dinner and fold a few socks, I might actually be able to implement some of these systems. Any takers?

I’m pleased to say that reader Maria has ALREADY ordered her external hard drive based on all your comments, and reader Katy is looking for a suggestion on one to buy. Not like I’m the expert or anything, but I did consult a computer professional when choosing a backup drive, and we have this one, except when I bought it less than a year ago it was half the storage and twice the price or something like that. If your computer is new enough and you spend a little more you can get one with a Firewire connection, but our drive is just USB 2.0 and I find it lightning fast, actually.

Falling asleep yet? No? The next paragraph ought to take care of that.

Western Digital, Lacie and Iomega are all good choices for external drives (Don’t take it from me, check cnet.com and Amazon for reviews), and I’ve heard Maxtor isn’t very reliable—the fact that their drives are about half the price of the brands listed above ought to be your first clue that quality isn’t exactly their middle name. That being said, though, all hard drives CAN fail, so if you really love your pictures and your videos, look into off site storage as well.

And because I am helpful and because I really like SmugMug for off site storing and sharing of pictures and videos, here [rgRZPlbjuLfcc ] is a coupon code for $5 off a new account with them. Plus I get a discount of my own if you use that to sign up. And we all love discounts, don’t we?

Here’s what one of my galleries looks like on SmugMug, if you want to take a look.

Now go, back something up.

Anna Sawin

Anna Sawin is a Connecticut-based portrait, wedding, and editorial photographer. She lives in the shoreline town of Stonington with her family and has discovered the perfect cupcake. Just ask, she is willing to share her secret.

9 Comments

  1. sdh on March 4, 2008 at 6:53 pm

    yay! our Time Capsule arrived today. we’ll let you know how it works…

  2. erin on March 4, 2008 at 10:33 pm

    oh i need to do this! thanks for reminding me!

  3. B. on March 5, 2008 at 10:14 am

    Nice recommendations…

  4. Amily on March 5, 2008 at 1:44 pm

    yeah on the smugmug coupon – thank you! I need to start uploading pics. will reply to your email soon…sorry for the delay…hands full of babies these days 🙂

  5. elizabethews on March 5, 2008 at 6:20 pm

    I’m not sure that this is going to sound the way it does in my head, but I want to live in your photographs. They are so beautiful and they capture such emotion and they just make me happy…

    Thanks for the organizing tips too! 🙂

  6. Jess on March 6, 2008 at 12:43 pm

    Ours is an HP MediaVault that holds 300GB, but it’s NAS, not USB, which means it has to be plugged into the router. But you can save to it wirelessly, which is great. We are SO paranoid that we actually have a dual one–they mirror each other so that if the hard drive AND one of the external drives fail we will STILL have everything saved. It was way pricey but totally worth it because now I never worry about losing all my photos. Though I also put all the best ones on Flickr in case our apt burns down or something. Wow I’m paranoid.

  7. Maria on March 7, 2008 at 11:54 am

    The super external drive arrived in the mail today! I’m one step closer to saving my beloved photos…..now just need to plug it in and hope for the best!
    Thanks Anna !

  8. Chelle on March 7, 2008 at 7:27 pm

    OMG. I so have to go there. Beignets? Do they have the Chantilly cream, too? I am in love with this post. It just might be a girl crush!

    😉

  9. Kim on March 8, 2008 at 1:05 pm

    I don’t know if you or any of your readers uses a mac…..but we just go an external drive for our mac and they have a great program called time machine, which is built into their new OS and it works with the external drive to automatically back up your whole computer by the hour, day, and week. It’s awesome. We just plugged it in and the mac did the rest…. it’s amazing! I highly recommend it for any mac users out there.

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anna

Anna Sawin is a Connecticut-based portrait, wedding, and editorial photographer. She lives in the shoreline town of Stonington with her family and has discovered the perfect cupcake. Just ask, she is willing to share her secret.