By Veronica Carrillo

Almost everybody is using digital cameras or phone cameras to take photographs and create priceless digital photo memories. However, do you back-up? I wanted to outline some approaches for backing up digital photos and what to do if you were not able to back-up. Why back-up? From power surge, to user error, to a virus attack can wipe out your files. When it does happen, you do not want to lose years of precious photos. It is always better to be cautious rather than taking risks with digital photographs. Backing up your precious digital photographs can save you a lot of heartaches. Now that you agree that you need to back, what are the different back-up approaches? There are many and I have boiled them down to the top six approaches:

If you are storing important information on your computer - personal or professional - you need to be aware that data loss can happen in many ways. One of the most common causes of data failure is of course corruption of the media you have stored your data on which is probably going to be the hard disk drive. Another factor that can cause data failure is power spikes or power failure. Power surges are one of the reasons why hard drives get corrupted. Also, a power failure might mean that you had not been able to save the documents you are working on or that they got damaged during the process. Finally, viruses can delete files from the machine they infect. Taking regular backups along with virus protection are probably the two most important maintenance tasks that you should be doing regularly. Of course, occasionally even your backups might fail and you may need to carry out a quick bkf repair but we will come to that later.

Back-up on Your Computer This may be the most logical option but potentially not the best. Most people download their digital photographs to their computer and use their computer as the storage device. If you do so, then be sure that you are not worried about the storage memory capacity of your computer. If you are, then you should consider some of the other back-up approaches. Also, if your computer is regularly backed up using automatic back-up software, storing pictures on your computer may slow the performance and increase the time for periodic back-ups.

Of course, as we mentioned earlier, there are times when even your backups get damaged and you may need to carry out a bkf repair. When you use backup utilities to carry out backups, they are typically saved as files with the bkf extension. Now the very same reasons that cause a corruption in your hard drive like power surges, viruses or system shutdowns can cause problems with your backup files as well.

So what do you do if you find that despite being extra careful and taking regular backups, you are in a situation where you are going to lose all your data because your backups are also damaged? You can use a program such as Advanced BKF Repair that will allow you to repair these files easily. Further, this is a highly versatile program that performs bkf repair on files created not just with Windows backup utilities but also on those created with Backup Exec on NT, Macintosh, Netware and OS/2.

Back-up on Facebook or Orkut Potentially a cost effective approach to Back-up Approach 5 and can provide the additional benefit of being able to share these photographs with other people Other Points to Consider While creating a backup plan, you should look for software that will either routinely backup your data, or schedule a backup to run at a precise time. Using such automatic backup software will remind you to periodically save your files. Some of the prime back-up programs are Dantz's Retrospect Professional and Stomp's Backup MyPC. These programs can handle a wide range of devices including DVD drives. If you did not back-up or if back-up was not done correctly and you think that you have lost your data, fear not as there are Photo Recovery Software that can recover digital photos from corrupted or unusable media and storage devices. Read my Photo Recover Software Review article written a few months back to get reviews on several leading photo recovery software. In this article, I recommended Adroit Photo Recovery software over other software. One of the reasons was the ability of Adroit Photo Recovery to recover more pictures using a technique called SmartCarving. SmartCarving allowed the user to recover fragmented photos. Other applications did not recover fragmented photos.

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