(Check out this week’s blog love for some great posts…)
I have a problem.
You wouldn’t know it by looking at me. I don’t hoard normal things like QVC products and winter coats and cough medicine.
I hoard photographs…rather….my computer hoards them. It is bogged down with eight years worth of pictures and videos. And they are not backed up.
I KNOW! It’s dangerous…I know. If something were to happen to my computer I would throw myself into a wall. Repeatedly. While screaming, “HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN TO ME!?!?!!”
I should have taken a hint when my computer started acting all crazy like…refusing to be turned off….working slowly…flashing scary “help me before I blow up in your face” screens.
Rather than “fix” my computer, I told Pat that it’s “vintage” and that I should really just have a new one. So he did what any thoughtful husband WOULD do.
He bought himSELF a computer and gave me his. My vintage computer still sits in questionable condition and I have to be honest. I’m worried about it.
So I decided to do the scary thing. I’ve decided to back up the pictures on The Vintage and learn how to create dvds from the videos and….brace yourselves….DELETE the folders upon folders of photos from my computer.
I have no idea what I’m doing. It’s comical. I have a trillion old cds with pictures on them from when I decided to do this three years ago, but then never deleted the photos I was attempting to back up. So now I have no idea what’s on those cds…where they start and end etc. I have an account with Costco that has various albums with no rhyme or reason, and I have a Flickr account that has most of my recent bloggable photos. But there is little order to my photo filing system. Each folder is labeled by the month and year, but none of the photos are named. There is no complete package that has ALL my stuff on it other than this computer.
It’s a mess.
And in an effort to get more sleep I thought it would be a great idea to take on….the…undertaking of getting things in order at 10pm on a Sunday night.
I don’t know what else to tell you other than I’m super smart like that.
This is going to take forever.
I successfully deleted February…and then panicked and retrieved it from my recycling bin…because what if the cds get lost and Costcos website is destroyed and my Flickr account is removed and the USB memory card thing is lost…THEN WHAT!?!
I’ll tell you then what…then I’m screwed. And I’ll never remember my babies.
I have a feeling this is going to be a slow journey for me. Instead of “backing up” the files I’m just creating more ways for me to access them. Just in case. It’s like when those people who go to help the hoarders try to throw something away and the hoarders start making excuses for why they have to keep that particular item…and every single item is hemmed and hawed over before the hoarder just kicks everyone out because they simply can’t part with ANYTHING.
Yeah that’s me.
How do you back up your files and photos? Am I the only one with an unhealthy attachment to the bajillion pictures on my computer?
And please take a moment and marvel at the most adorable little singer ever! I was telling my friends how ridiculously cute Maile was when she was two…here’s the video I was talking about girls.
{ 85 comments… read them below or add one }
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I too have issues with photos. I just got a back up drive for Christmas, but I still havent moved too many pictures.. Like you said, it’s a slow porcess.
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Mama Kat Reply:
January 11th, 2010 at 2:01 pm
Yeah and the longer you wait the worse it gets. SUCH a project.
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I do the same thing. Finally my husband bought me a 1.5TB external hard drive for all my pics :)
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Mama Kat Reply:
January 11th, 2010 at 2:02 pm
And I like having the pictures right there where I can grab them easily for a post or something. I don’t want to have to track down the photos I’m after.
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Get a separate external hard drive – cut the folders from your computer and paste them on the hard drive – so easy, and painless ;) I also have ALL of my pictures on Flickr – but was sad to find out that I have to continue to pay them in order to see them all :( bummer! The external hard drive is my best friend ;) and it’s lighter than lugging my 25+ photo albums around ;)
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I lost over 5000 pictures when my hard drive crashed last year. I had about 200 of them on photobucket but the rest are gone forever :( now I back up regularly!!
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Mama Kat Reply:
January 11th, 2010 at 2:09 pm
I mean…it sounds silly, but I just think that is SOOO sad!! All the time we spend taking just the right picture….all those moments. 5000!! There was nothing you could do?? It’s stories like yours that have me working on this thing to begin with!
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OK I am right there with you. I have a thing for family photos and carry a camera with me wherever I go .. drives hubby and kids batty. BUT like you I had them all stored on my puter . I finally made CD’s and labelled them of what range they went through. Make yourself a special holder that holds ONLY the pics CD’s and in the front make an index starting with the first CD in teh case and going on down the line. That way you can simply look at th index and go to the CD you need. I also backed a lot of mine up on Picnik and Photobucket and I have an online backup through my web provider that automatically uplaods them the minute I put them on the puter…
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honestly i have about 5 boxes of christmas stuff under our bed. Its roomy under there! (or at least it was) i think we need the clean house lady to come to our homes! :)
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I just did this about a year and a half ago when I bought my new computer. It IS nerve wracking so I ended up backing up everything twice. Because if something happens to one DVD, it surely can’t happen to TWO of them, right?
Oh and that is the cutest child ever.
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Mama Kat Reply:
January 11th, 2010 at 2:14 pm
LOVE that idea…I will be backing and double backing. And I will store the second copies in a concealed underground safe.
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SOOOOO cute!! If we were friends then, I totally would have kidnapped her like you tried to do to Landon yesterday. Adorable!
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Mama Kat Reply:
January 11th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
The funny thing is she was SOOOO bad! I look at those videos and have to remind myself how difficult she was. She bit and hit her friends, she screamed like crazy when she wouldn’t get her way…we butted heads BIG time back then. I was totally out of tricks to try to get her to behave herself. Now I look back and think, “awwww, she’s cute…what was all that fuss about??”
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if you have a mac.. you can get a time capsule and it will do it all for you.. automatically.. wirelessly .. magically! ta dah!
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Mama Kat Reply:
January 11th, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Hmmm…that sounds like a good enough reason to beg Pat to buy me a Mac. Thank you!
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You back up your stuff? Oh, gee, I suppose that would make perfect sense. I have never done it…smacking my head against the keyboard…I am a dumbass!
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Mama Kat Reply:
January 11th, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Seriously. If I would have just thought to do this and keep up on it every six months or so it wouldn’t be so bad. But there’s SO much stuff. Get started Mama…we can’t be losing all our pictures!
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Get an external hard drive and back up to it now! Also try the company Moxy which lets you back up your information online for small fee each month.
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I’m like you: I don’t back up my files from my laptop, and I really should because my laptop travels with me, and who knows what could happen. Add that to my resolutions for 2010: get external hard drive and back up all laptop files. I’ve tried going through iPhoto and deleting bad photos… yeah, it is daunting! I feel your pain, Kathy!
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Mama Kat Reply:
January 11th, 2010 at 2:23 pm
Just imagine if it got STOLEN! Isn’t it amazing how we’ve come to depend on these computers!?! Whatever happened to just developing photos and putting them in albums??
Hmmm….I should do that too…
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Now there is no way I’m reading 70 comments to find out if you got any good advice…i’m holding a newborn here. BUT, if you do, get some good advice that is, please tell us.
I’m a hoarder of pictures too…not only that but I print them and then forget to mark that I printed them and have no idea which pictures are printed and which arent. and because i (now) have 6 kids I have a LOT of pictures. Like millions. I have like millions of pictures…of which only thousands are printed…and only some are saved. BECAUSE i never backed up my old computer I lost about a years worth…but some of htem were printed…only i’ll never know which. and now it’s like that year never happened.
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Mama Kat Reply:
January 11th, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Yep…you’re describing EXACTLY what I do! (minus the 6 kids).
So far people are saying to back up using a removable drive. I guess there are places online that you can pay to keep your files backed up there too. And you can burn your files to cds. The removable drive sounds easiest and least expensive…
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External hard drive is definately the way to go. It’s still really easy to access all your photos that way, so you don’t feel like they’re off in some far away place where you will never see them again.
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I back mine up onto an external hard drive with a huge capacity…then I store the drive in my safe.
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Never get rid of any of your memory cards. You can retrieve pics even after you delete them. This happened to my father and he found a program online and got them back. I have two external hard drives. One is an Apple time machine that I LOVE because it AUTOMATICALLY backs up everything!!!! It also doubles as my wireless router. Best. Invention. Ever.
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O.M.G.!!!! I lost you!!!! I lost you! Last night while laying in bed you and Victor E. popped in my head and I realized I hadn’t read anything from you lately! Craptastic!
Justine :o )
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I have tons of folders which are named by month and year. The pictures themselves have no name. Some of them date back to 2003. The rest before that, are on film. And who knows where they are.
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Just get an external hard drive…no need to delete anything!
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I had more than 4,000 pictures on my computer, none of which were backed up, most of which haven’t been printed. They were taunting me and haunting me. I asked for an external hard drive for Christmas so I could back them up and get them out of my nightmares. The day after Christmas, before I could get the external hard drive out of the box, the computer CRASHED!!!! Take this as a lesson learned.
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Your alternate title could have been, “Hello, my name is Kat and I’m a photo ho”.
So as I was saying earlier, I lost your damn blog, but now I have it back. Of course…. if you had been visiting ME once in a while this issue could have been resolved long ago. But now you’re buried in a bazillion photos of your gorgeous kids. I can’t compete with that.
Justine :o )
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I don’t delete any photos off my memory cards, so I have like a million memory cards. I have a bunch of photos before I started this “method” that I need to back up though… from what it looks like external HD is the way to go. I did lose about 200 photos on an old laptop…but those were of my single days, and I don’t miss those as much as I would my sons first year of life.
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Please…please…puhleeeeeeease…back up your photos. It was always on my “to do” list, and my laptop got stolen on Christmas Eve while we were out of town, and now years of pictures of my girls are G.O.N.E. for.ev.er. Makes me sick to my stomach just thinking about it. :(
I have heard picasa is a great web tool for storing, editing, organizing photos. But if you want to leave them in folders on your PC, there is a web-based backup program called Carbonite that our company uses to back up all the files on our PCs in case they were to crash one day. We would just go to Carbonite’s website on our new, functional, computer – and download all of our saved files to the new one.
Don’t wait to save the photos…pretty pretty please.
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MOZY!! MOZY !! MOZY !!!
It’s reasonably priced and they do not encode your videos like most online photo storage places. The first upload takes a long time, but the rest are automatic, shorter and faster.
THe other thing is you can use an external hard drive that your photo software points to. . .so it feels like it is on your computer but isn’t so your computer is not bogged down by allllll that data.
Good luck
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You are not alone. I actually did back up a couple years worth of pictures to cd back when my ten year old was very small. Back when cds were less reliable. And my computer crashed. . .then the cd wouldn’t open anymore. All those squeezable picture of my adorable baby were gone.
Now I have an external hard drive and upload a lot of photos to my mobileme account. Which is a good thing since last year’s file alone has over 10,000 pictures, and I have several years on there.
On my computer I use lightroom to tag and organized and develop my pictures and iphoto to save and upload the best ones. Both have handy ways to label and organize. Good Luck!
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–>I probably close to 30,000 photos taken in the last decade. Our home computer houses them all by folder name/month year and the system is “mirrored” so if something happens to one hard drive it’s backed up on the same. Having wrote all that, I am still convinced I’m going to lose them all. I suggest a $80 external hard drive that you can copy everything over to once a month so you know you really have everything safe.
http://www.WebSavvyMom.com
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–>I have probably close to 30,000 photos taken in the last decade. Our home computer houses them all by folder name/month year and the system is “mirrored” so if something happens to one hard drive it’s backed up on the same. Having wrote all that, I am still convinced I’m going to lose them all. I suggest a $80 external hard drive that you can copy everything over to once a month so you know you really have everything safe.
http://www.WebSavvyMom.com
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I totally hear ya on the picture hoarding! I finally joined a SmugMug.com to back up all my pictures. I love it!
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I use Picassa. I love it because I can easily and quickly just scroll through all my pictures (it’s set up like a contact sheet). And like everything Google does, it’s free, user friendly and has lots of features. you can tag, and star and easily upload to blogs (blogger of course sorry!), store sites (the plus here is it will keep your organization, it will name your Walgreen’s or CVS folders the same as on your computer) or web pages. It also has simply editing tools as well. Than I back everything up to an external drive and hubby than does something else fancy and tech like to it and gets them on a DVD (or 2 we may be up to 2 or 3).
We usually back up once a year but it’s been a little longer, need to get on that!
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I am paranoid about losing everything on my computer…including my photos. I do have an external drive and remember to back it up every week or so, but I need to put all my photos on a dvd as well. What I really want to do is use a service to back up my computer…that is a goal this year.
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We have tons of photos on our computer too. I just backed them up using Google Picasa. It was really easy. They are now on DVDs and Picasa will keep track of when the last back up was so I’m not spending all my time backing up the same thing.
Good luck it is dauting, that’s for sure!
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Oh she’s adorable! And don’t waste time on CDs, but an external hard drive!
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I have 3yrs worth (3G) of pics and my disc drive doesn’t work. Freak out! So I uploaded every single one to Snapfish. At least they are there if, read:WHEN, my laptop goes to the big junk pile in the sky.
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Oh, I’m with ya. Except I don’t back anything up. I just have all the photos saved with the generic names on my computer in monthly dated folders. I haven’t printed any pictures since 2000. And I have nothing backed up. It’s on my to do list, but it’s SOOOO far down there I can’t even see it.
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We have tons of photos too. We buy a removable hard drive, back up the photos and keep them in a fireproof, waterproof safe. You really shouldn’t mess with this stuff … get them backed up NOW. There are also places where you can store them online safely. There may be money involved but 8 years worth of photos are worth it.
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