Keeping your photography data safe

So you’re out on your first photography gig, or you’re out on the countryside taking your first batch of nature or landscape pics. Digital photography is a great way to capture images and the world in your own way. Photographers at one point or another will need to download their images when they run out of memory card space. This is where keeping your data safe comes in.

Get external storage device

Laptops and netbooks crash or malfunction. That is, for the moment, a certain reality. Netbooks and laptops are logical appendages for digital SLR photographers — one can easily review and make simple edits on a laptop after a digital photography session. Netbooks, in particular, have very limited hard disk space, some of the old ones have 160GBs as a standard, newer ones have 250GB hard drives installed.

ASUS 1201N - a perfect travel mate for photographers

As much as 250GBs sound like a lot of space, once you start taking pictures and enjoying/learning to use your Nikon D700, digital SLR photography data can take up a lot of space.  Logically, you download your memory card data onto your netbook. But when your netbook malfunctions for one reason or another, your data becomes compromised.

Pentax K2000 - perfect starter camera for your first few photography sessions

Getting an external storage device is a sure way to prevent accidental loss of data. One option is to save your files onto a portable hard drive, and only transfer to your netbook the pictures that you need for editing. There are a lot of external hard drive models available, whether you use a Mac or PC. Firewire portable hard drives can give you faster data transfer speeds. DIGISTOR Firewire portable hard drives are especially handy, so you can bring your data along wherever you go.

Archive your photography data

Archiving is another sure way of protecting your data. If you are mildly sure that you won’t be using some batches of pictures for editing or other purposes, archiving is a good way of protecting your data, ass well as freeing up precious space on your hard drives.

DIGISTOR Portable Hard Drive - Great storage device for your photography data

You can burn your data to standard DVD discs, DVD-RAM, or the high capacity Blu-ray discs. For each option, you will need a burner — external DVD burners, DVD-RAM burners, or external Blu-ray burners are recommended for flexibility and portability. A standard DVD and DVD-RAM discs can take up to 9GBs of data on dual layer. A blu-ray disc can take up to 50GBs on a dual-layer burn. Once you’ve burnt your data onto the optical media, label them and keep them in archive, always available for you to use if and when you need them.