As a parent you are snapping away daily, just like me. Photos from your kids playing with their toys, on the swing in the park, on a holiday etc. It’s endless. I am particularly taking a lot of photos on my phone. It’s something I have with me at all times. Occasionally though, and it’s something I want to do more often this year, I am using my Sony compact camera which takes amazing quality images.
But how do you keep all these photos safe? What if your phone crashes, what if the SD card in your camera is corrupt? How and where do you keep them safe? What is the best way?
Up until 4 years ago, I used to keep all my photos on my laptop. Not the safest place either, if you think about. A laptop is very likely to crash these days and it would be a shame if you lost all your precious photos on it.
There are options to save all your photos on an external hard drive but I use the more efficient and safest way.
When I purchased my HTC ONE phone, they also gave me the option to create an account with a company called Dropbox. Dropbox keeps your documents, files and photos safe online. It’s a cloud based product.
Source dropbox.com
1,200,000,000 files are being saved daily on Dropbox which is a massive amount.
Source dropbox.com
Originally I just got a few GB to start off with for free on my phone but it slowly built up and I only had this option for 2 years. We have so many photos going back years and years that I wanted to keep our Dropbox account and just pay yearly. Now everyone has a different opinion on this and some think it’s too expensive and just go ahead and buy a external hard drive, but that is entirely up to everyone.
We are paying €99 for 500GB of space. Last year then we received a lovely email from Dropbox telling us that we are going to receive another 500GB for the same price. So right now we have 1TB to fill with more memories. We are only at 64GB at the moment which means it will take us quite some time.
Dropbox can be accessed via the web, a mobile app or the desktop app. When you install the desktop app on your PC/laptop, it keeps a copy of all your files on your PC. If you have new files to upload, you can add them by simply copy and paste into the relevant folder.
Another thing I love is, whenever you take a photo on your phone, it syncs and uploads it automatically into a folder on your Dropbox account called Camera Uploads, once you have a data connection such as 3G or Wifi. This can be configured of course. This is very handy, for example when hubby is away somewhere in the world with work like he is right now, I can see photos of the places he is traveling to in seconds.
Dropbox is definitely easy to use and I would recommend it to everyone out there who likes to keep their files secure online rather than on their PC or hard drive.
How do you backup/ keep your photos safe?
I am so paranoid about losing photos since the time I had a laptop and a backup drive die in the same week. I keep all of them in Dropbox but I also back them up to Smugmug. I also blog and Smugmug is a good option if you want to embed photos in your site instead of uploading them to your WordPress media library.
I use dropbox along with another cloud back up system – you can never be too careful!
we have an apple time capsule which we bought on e-bay. it backs up from our computers every day so hopefully all photos on there. great post xx
Author
with dropbox you should be able to cover everything. 500gb is a lot
I’ve lost a ridiculous amount of photos over the years as I’ve never got around to backing them up. I use google photos now so they all go online which makes things easier.
It is so important to look after all your photos, they are special memories.
I’m not a dropbox fan. Mine’s full from my photos on there, as I only had the free alllocation, and I’ve never found it that nice to use. Maybe if you pay you get more fancy layout, but I prefer hard drives…although I really should start using my Amazon S2 which is where I save my blog back ups to (for some reason mine wouldn’t go to dropbox even when it did have space). So far I think it’ll be cheaper than Dropbox – that seems expensive when I think I got a 3TB external drive for around that price.
I do need to do a massive clear out, organisation and back up again. They say you should have cloud, and hard drive, plus something external outside of the home. It’s just finding the time!
We use dropbox at work for everything. I have it at home too, but only the freebie and it’s totally used up. I should consider the purchasing option but tit’s difficult to cover everything!
Ohh I have a coud hardrive which is kind of similar, but I like that dropbox is just there. I’ve never really used it before! Off to check it out properly. xx #love2blog
I use Dropbox too but what I really want to do is make a photobook. It’s such a huge proje t though especially as I’m taking new photos daily!
I tried Dropbox but filled my quota very quickly. My laptop is starting to play up so I have just bought a 1TB external hardrive for £40. I have already transferred my 38,000 – yes 38,000 photos on to it! And took up less than 200GB. I never got on with icloud either. Kaz x
I really need to backup all my photos incase I loose them! I may do this tomorrow. Great post x
I use drop box too. On my old phone I lost all my precious photos of my baby when he was a newborn, I was devastated, thankfully some of them were on facebook though x
We love Dropbox. All our phones are connected and it’s lovely to see each other’s photos at the end of the day.
I’ve never considered Dropbox. All my photos are on a PC but I’m terrified of losing them! Will give Dropbox a look I think. Thanks for sharing! x
Oh I never considered Dropbox – We have the free version that I use for transferring files but really need to sort our photo storage as our Time Capsule appears to have stopped working.
We use Dropbox its such a good idea to have a safe space for all ur favourite photos. We take so many on a daily basis that a laptop or other device is probably not wise to use s ur only back up from ur camera.
I use the free option on Dropbox. I mostly use it to transfer photos between my laptop and phone so I don’t need a massive amount of storage. I use a separate sound cloud for storage that I got at a bargain price as part of my package when I bought my laptop.
Debbie
Yeah, dropbox is such an amazing tools to store all your photo. I also like storing it on my USB or hard drive. It’s probably the best options for me.
I had never really thought about going beyond my computer for keeping photographs safe but you are absolutely right. Thankfully I used iCloud from my iPhone, macbook and iMac, as they are all connected. Which I think is similar to dropbox. It’s certainly something to think about. Thanks for sharing.