Working On Me

The holidays have leapt upon us once again, and that means your digital camera is going to get a workout. It doesn’t matter if you’re a casual photographer with a small point-and-shoot or a major shutterbug with the latest dSLR: You need a good way to store and back up your images for safekeeping. Plus, since HD pocket camcorders like the Flip Mino HD are topping many wish lists this year, you also need to consider where you’re going to put all that video content after you upload the good bits to YouTube. What’s the point of taking pictures and movies if in 10 years you can’t look back at Aunt Gretchen’s eggnog-buzz-induced dance moves or the kids’ sugar-buzz-induced unwrapping frenzy?

Luckily, the options for backing up data are about as numerous as the Salvation Army Santas on the street corners this time of year. What you choose depends on a few factors: how much money you’re willing to spend, how much storage you actually need, and how secure (or private) you want your data to be. For example, if you’re shooting all your photographs in RAW format and also taking a lot of HD video, you’re going to need much more space than someone just shooting a few pictures to upload to a Facebook photo album. Everyone has different needs, so it’s good to figure out what those are before you start shopping around.

Let’s assume that you’ve already found a good photo organizer that you enjoy working with, like iPhoto, Picasa, or Windows Live Photo Gallery. You don’t necessarily need one, but it’s an easy way to sort your images into galleries and by events or date. For online synching, iPhoto allows you to automatically upload images to Flickr (unlimited Pro Account for $24.99 a year) or to Apple’s MobileMe Gallery or iDisk (up to 20 GB for $99 a year). MobileMe is most beneficial for people looking to synch all their data across multiple devices: their iPhone, work and home computers, etc. If you’re just looking to upload photos and don’t need that other functionality then there are better, more cost-efficient options out there. For example, on the other side of the spectrum, Google’s Picasa offers 1 GB of storage on Picasa Web Albums. Considering the software and the online storage are both free, I would call that a pretty good deal. Video is a bit of a different animal in this respect: there aren’t many sites that are simply used as video “storage.” But if you want to keep your videos in HD without worrying about the troglodyte commenters of YouTube descending upon you, try Vimeo. The basic free account allows you to upload one new HD video a week, while Vimeo Plus ($59.95 a year) lets you upload 5 GB of HD content a week to your account. Of course, you can keep the videos private if you’re not interested in sharing your personal rendition of “White Christmas” with the masses, or choose to embed the full HD video onto your blog for the world to see.

For more secure online backup without the fancy online photo albums, your options are very good. Mozy ($4.95 per month) and Carbonite ($54.95 per year) work for both Mac and PC users and give you unlimited backup space. They typically run in the background of your computer, and you can schedule the synching to run when it’s most convenient for you (for example, late at night so that the surge in bandwidth use doesn’t cripple your Internet speed). If you don’t need unlimited storage space but want the added benefit of easy file sharing features, check out Box.net and Dropbox. For personal use (not counting their business and enterprise options) Box.net tops off at 10 GB for $9.95 a month, while Dropbox has a plan for 50 GB for $9.99 a month. They have smaller, free versions that cap at 1 GB and 2 GB, respectively. Both allow you to link directly to files and folders for sharing, and Dropbox can even act as its own folder on your desktop for easy drag-and-dropping of files. I’ve used both in the past, but Dropbox is the one that I keep coming back to because of the simplicity of the folder function. It’s like boosting your computer’s hard-drive space without having to take it apart, and the upload speeds are quite good.

There’s a reason that I recommend online storage before external hard drives and DVDs—while there’s always the small possibility of an online storage company losing your data, the fact of the matter is that human error can cause physical backup solutions to fail or lose data. Even the most tech-savvy among us can make a mistake, and, as I know so well, there are few moments in day-to-day life more frustrating than when you realize you’ve just formatted an entire 500 GB external hard drive with all your backups on it. (How I recovered that data will be a discussion for another day!) And should a natural disaster strike, having your data safe in the “cloud” is much better than having it in your home. You know how we all say that if we could save three items from a fire, we’d start with the photo albums? You won’t even have to bother digging for them if the memories are safe online. However, it can’t hurt to have redundant backups, so picking up an external drive would be a nice addition to the overall process. The cost of hard-drive space continues to drop: Now you can get a 2 terrabyte external drive for around $280. That’s enough space to store a lifetime of holiday pictures.

There are obviously tons of options out there, but the payback for taking a little time to scope out which backup plan works best for you is truly invaluable. Maybe you should “self-gift” one of these plans this holiday season—you know, to treat yourself for all that family photography work.

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