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Backing Up Your Memories – Now, not Later

March 8, 2009 by 9 Comments

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Photo by Topato

It’s been said many times before but it’s worth mentioning once again.  BACK UP YOUR FILES.  I don’t mean some time next week or next month, I mean right now!  I say this because you never know when the big crash is going to happen.  A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine asked me if there was anyway to move her music from her iPod back onto her computer.  See, she had everything on her laptop and it recently died in the most terrible of ways.  Her hard drive was completely gone.  So today I get to tell her that everything she has loaded on her iPod that wasn’t purchased through iTunes will be completely gone when she syncs back to her repaired laptop.  This isn’t the worst part.  She can go back and rip her CD’s over time and rebuild her music library but what she can’t do is recover all the photographs that she had stored on her computer.  She didn’t have any of them backed up and now they are gone with the wind.

It’s too late for my friend but not too late for you.  If you don’t have a back-up strategy, start thinking about one now.  You can save to CD or DVD or external drives but think about redundancy.  Always think of the worse-case scenario.  If there was a fire, would your back-up files be destroyed along with your computer?  If so, think about keeping a spare set at a friend’s house.  This might seem a little overkill but when you consider what is at stake, it’s worth the effort.

If you aren’t sure which back-up method is right for you, I urge you to check out the Complete Guide to Photo Backups written by Brian Auer of Epic Edits.  Brian covered about every option you could think of along with their pro’s and con’s so that you can start planning your best strategy to save your memories for the years to come.

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  • http://martybugs.net/blog Martin

    That’s an extremely good point. There are far too many people who never do any backups….when in reality, backing up your data is not that complex.

    Once you’ve lost your data….it’s too late to do anything about it (although there are companies that can recover data from dead hdds, but it’s a very expensive exercise…), so you need to ensure you backup your data BEFORE you have a failure ;-)

  • Mike Nelson Pedde

    This is one thing I stress over and over again to people (much of it to no avail). Even without catastrophic loss such as fire or theft, computer media is almost ephermal by nature. Remember floppy disks? They were worth a year or two. Even CDs and DVDs – some of them ‘archival’, some of them not, don’t last forever. We have books that are centuries old, but nothing digital is designed to last more than a decade or so. Hard drives can die for any number of reasons, and without warning. I’ve had to rebuild my computer from a backup drive more than once. And today there’s no reason to avoid doing a backup. An external drive with a USB or firewire connector can be had for a couple of hundred bucks, and you can store it at your friend’s house if you like. How often should you back things up? How much can you afford to lose?

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  • http://craniac.net Steve Crane

    With regard to your friend’s iPod problem; there are several solutions for moving songs from an iPod to a computer. Googling for “copy music off ipod” is a good place to start looking.

  • http://www.saschanjaa.com Sascha Njaa

    One thing to prevent the music from disappearing from the ipod is to start up itunes (before plugging in the ipod) and turn off the automatic synchronisation. That way it wont delete the stuff you have on your ipod… it does however mean that u need to manually move music over (something I prefer doing anyways). And yes, like Steve said there are several ways to copy music off your ipod, so she should be ok… as long as she (or you) check out the ways to fix it before for example plugging the ipod into the PC/mac and letting it synchronize.

  • http://www.Sean-Phillips.com Sean Phillips

    There are tons of ways to get stuff off an iPod without using iTunes. Check out a good list here:

    http://www.gadgetspage.com/audio-video/make-sure-you-have-a-backup-of-your-ipod.html

  • Rich Johnson

    Great article! I agree 100% as I lost data not once, but TWICE due to a stolen lap top and then a hard drive crash! I learned the hard way…

    Now, I back up using DoubleVault ( http://www.doublevault.com ). It was the best service I found. It is not free – but it is the best, for sure. Most secure and much – much faster than the other two services I tried before I backed up all of my financial records, photographs and music. The last two years I have had no reason to loose sleep.

    RJ

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  • http://www.flickr.com/photos/nieblung Brian

    I’ve used “YamiPod” a few times in the past and it works pretty well. The program runs by itself (it’s OS independent) and can get the music off of the iPod. http://www.yamipod.com/main/modules/home/