House Fires and Backing Up Photos

Over the years I have scanned a lot of my paper photos. And, several years ago, I sent out a bunch of negatives I had to have them scanned as well. They are then backed up with the rest of my digital photos.

But, I do not have everything backed up. And, in the case of a fire, I would probably lose a lot of those traditional scrapbooks I did from 1999 to 2010 because there are actually too many for me to try to get out. I suppose I could pull them out and take pictures of the pages to at least have that if something were to happen. Because some of them are photos that are special (parent's wedding and Dad's Navy years) and can never get back.

 

I have hundreds of my own photos to scan and now I have all of my grandma's albums to scan as well.

From my experience, breaking down the project into small chunks is the best way . . . but I have to admit I haven't scanned in quite a while now. Doing small chunks CONSISTENTLY is the key to work through a huge collection of photos and layouts.

Don't use Google's PhotoScan app for digitizing your photos and layouts. The resolution isn't great and it basically stitches things together so you get a loss of detail there as well. I've had better luck just taking a photo with my phone's camera over the PhotoScan app.

The photos and albums that I have digitized are backed up along with all my digital photos and layouts . . . with Backblaze. <3

 

I spent a year taking photos of all my paper scrapbooks and photos. I also bought a negative scanner and scanned the negatives and slides. I did photos of printed photos because I liked that quality better than the scan of the same photos.
Are the negatives fabulous? No. But if something catastrophic happens? I still have a copy of those photo. They are good enough to print and scrap with.
My paper scrap pages I took a lightbox photo with my DSLR. I printed one, and it was fine quality for me.
So, all of that is backed up on two different ehds, and online. DH knows what ehd to grab if there's time. If not, at least we have it digitally.

Moving forward: when a printed photo comes in the house (like santa photos or photo strips) I snap a quick pic. That way I upkeep my work.
I'm sure there are better options available, but this is enough for me and my memories.

 

Oh, I should add: all my stuff is backed up to Backblaze, but just in case, all my photos also live in Google photos. I use the free storage version, so they do compress the photos. I'm okay with that because that's my catastrophic backup, my plan C if you will. They print large enough for me to be happy if plans A and B are lost.

 

Like Courtney I had a negative scanner at one time. I did some of my own negative scanning with it. I also had a portable photo scanner at one time. And, back in the dark ages of computers I had a big flatbed scanner as well. Now I have a Canon printer with scanner that I use if I want to scan a photo. I got rid of the small photo scanner and negative scanner. I had so many negatives that I couldn't scan with it (110's and 126's from the dark ages) that I sent them off to be scanned.

All my digital stuff is saved to 2 EHD's and Backblaze.

 

I've photographed all my diaries and journals (dating back to 1980) with my DSLR. It was a big project I did in April-May 2012. Since then I've photographed a lot of papers/memorabilia with my phone and scanned a lot of photos with my all-in-one printer/scanner. Very irregularly and inconsistently. I'm still working on it!

All these files live on my EHD, Backblaze, and Smugmug.

 

This is next on my list.

Actually, You made me think of another project I want to do! LOL!

 

That is so sad and I am so sorry for those families!!

I have so many photos of my older kids that I need to get scanned/photographed and backed up somewhere. I have some, but not all. I say it's going to be my summer project every year, and then don't get to it.
I used to keep one EHD with photos on it at my mom's, just in case. But I got it back to add to it and haven't returned it. I also have some of them backed up to Amazon and Google Photos.
In the past, I've scanned, but I think I'm going to take photos of what I have left.

 

Too scary! At least everyone was okay. That's the most important thing.

I have scanned and backed up everything I came across starting with photos of my older daughter that weren't digital to heritage photos from my husband's and my parents. Currently, the only off site place I have them is Snapfish. Soon I hope to have it all on One Drive also.

 

Wow - do you live in Hershey? You are describing a local fire!

 

I'm about 20 minutes outside Hershey, but it's my hometown. I know exactly where this is and was following a friend's posting of it.

 

I have boxes of photos. You now have officially scared me into doing something with them as both my parents have died and those photos are more precious than gold to. me.

 

Honestly, I did that for a few years. Then I decided to make a goal of 15 minutes a week. I can find 15 minutes each week to work on it. I rarely ever did just 15 minutes, usually once I started I worked for an hour. But, little by little I got it done. And it didn't seem as overwhelming to just spend 1 hour.

 

I was thinking about that today. I pretty much decided that I'm going to get those boxes out of the closet this weekend and start a little at a time. At some point, I'd like to get through at least a good bit of mine so I can start getting some from mom's and work on those.

 

Oh you don't know how many years this was one of my good intentions! I was going to pass on MOC this year to scan. But even though I hate er truly dislike scanning, if I don't do it no one else will. I even may buy a better/easier scanner so I don't have to lift the lid on my Canon Pixma.

Any suggestions on the kind you feed image through like a shredder?

 

I'm so glad everyone made it out but my heart aches for them.

As for backing up items, I'd like to gently remind people to find a cloud service. I use BackBlaze and I really like it. It backs up my laptop and an EHD, which I named the F: drive so BB always can find it. Yesterday I plugged in three of my EHDs (I do regular "checks" to make sure stuff is on there; I realized somehow I'd skipped backing up last February's photos on one of them!). Anyway, a BB alert popped up saying "BackBlaze can only back up the D: drive when it's called F:!" BB recognized the drive and alerted me to the change in drive name. IDK why my laptop switched it's drive name since I assigned the letter F to it, so I'm glad BB let me know there was a problem! Because if there is a catastrophe here at my home, my laptop, no matter how many physical photos I scan/photograph with my DSLR, are gone if I don't have them digitally stored somewhere else--in this case, via BackBlaze. (Although I do keep an older EHD at my parents' as another backup location. But it's not current as I only get there once a year.)

 

Another Backblaze user here. Saved me this past summer.

My routine is to back up to BB and 2 EHD's. One EHD is just a mirror of the Digi-Scrapping folder on my C drive. The other one is using the WD backup software. After a power outage during a tornado warning on Memorial Day, my computer would not turn on. It was old so I decided to get a new desktop. I did have a laptop to use to surf the net until it came. Looking at the EHD's after connecting to the laptop, I found out the backup had quit working in early April. And, the other mirrored EHD had not been updated since the beginning of May.

BB to the rescue although it also had issues and had not backed up for a couple of days before the power outage. I don't blame BB, I think my computer had issues that I had been ignoring for awhile. I didn't lose any important financial documents but did have to have a couple of purchases here reset to re-download the zip files when I realized they were missing. TLP rocks if you ask nicely!

In addition to digi-scrapping stuff, I back up everything in the my documents folder to BB. That includes downloaded program exe files and lots of financial information in both pdf and excel file format.

I still have the same backup routine only I check to make sure all backups are working as scheduled every week.

 

This can happen depending on which order you plug ehd or other drives in too. Typically, your computer will auto assign the first available letter. I do what you do and have my ehd set to F, and the other one to M. It seems to keep my computer from getting confused.