1. Always download your memory cards to the hard drive of a virus-safe PC as soon as you’ve finished a day’s shooting. It’s wise to not reformat the card until you’ve confirmed that the download was successful.
2. Back up the images to an external hard drive. External drives are economical, and typically cost less than fifty cents per gigabyte of photo storage—a tremendous bargain. Plus they are separate from your computer, meaning that they are less likely to fail at the same time your computer’s hard drive might.
3. For added safety, back up your images again to a new location. This can be an additional external hard drive that you can store in a different location or an online sharing/storage site like Phanfare or one of the other popular sites.
4. Burn a DVD (or CD, depending on the number of images you need to archive). In fact, burn two or three—DVD media is very cheap.
5. Copy every image to the Shared Folder on your family’s network hard drive. Don’t have one? Give one a try. They’re reasonably priced, reasonably hack-safe and are very easy to install and configure. Best of all, they allow everyone in the family to back up—and share—all of the images.
6. Make a print! The picture that lasts the longest is the one you hold in your hands.
