Learning The Hard Way: Back Up Your Travel Photos!

I’ve learned the hard way why it’s important to backup your travel photos. A month after an amazing trip to Hawaii last year, ten days spent photographing every breathtaking, colorful view of Maui and Kauai that we could possibly see, my 6 month old laptop’s hard drive failed.

All our photos were gone. I didn’t have a backup anywhere. I hadn’t even gotten around to putting an album on Facebook or Flickr (and this was pre-Ever In Transit days, so I didn’t have any blog posts, either!) I was heartbroken.

The best of the 5 photos I took using my phone. The rest are history.

But at least I didn’t lose any other documents! The 10+ years of computer files, photos, and music that I’d had been saving since college. Surely those were recoverable. I’d stored them on my ~2 year old external hard drive a few months ago. I plugged it in and opened it up.

NOTHING!

The computer didn’t recognize the drive! My heart sank.

The next morning I took the external drive in to my friend, the I.T. guy at my office. He checked it out and said the drive had corrupted and the only way to restore it would be to pay a data recovery service over $1,000 (and even that wasn’t guaranteed!)

This was a tragedy for me because besides the people and pets shown in those photos, nothing is more important to me than my photos! I was angry at my computer, and even angrier at my electronic hard drive!

APPARENTLY, electronics fail over time! External drives last 3-4 years (I had bad luck, lasting only 2 years!) and CD-Rs/DVD-Rs that you’ve burned last less than a decade. It’s not good enough to save important documents in just one other place, you have to have them in at least two other places. Sheesh…

SanDisk can help!

A few months ago I won this SanDisk Memory Vault from a photography workshop I attended. The device is more durable than the average flash drive or external hard drive, and apparently tested to preserve data quality for up to 100 years!

Obviously, this promise is based on models. They couldn’t test it to be sure it would work for 100 years, and we most certainly will  have moved beyond USB data transfer infrastructure in 100 years… but that’s besides the point). The point is, this drive provides a little bit better security and piece of mind than the average electronic hard drive or storage device.

Now, this is NOT meant to back up your whole computer, or even all of your pictures. It’s small (only 8GB). It’s meant to back up the most important digital documents you have. Perhaps those are your wedding photos, collections of baby photos, scanned archival family photos, or photos from an important trip. It is pocket-sized and small enough to fit into a home lock box or safe, or for storage off-site in case of fire at your home.

This little gadget is currently selling for $35.99 on Amazon. I’m not using it because I’m already using a complicated method of data backup and archiving that involves two different external hard drives, two different cloud storage services, Flickr, and, oh… this blog, too (it’s definitely part of my memory archival strategy!)

So, I figured I’d give the drive away to one of you! Perhaps you could use it and it can offer increased peace of mind.

Here’s how to win:

We’re holding this contest through Rafflecopter, which will randomly select the winner from the entries we receive before the contest closes on November 11 (12:01am EST).  You can increase your chances of winning with multiple entries. Choose as many as you would like, using the widget below.

• Liking our Ever In Transit Facebook Page (or get 2 entries for free if you’re already following it!)
• Subscribe to our weekly email newsletter (all the week’s posts and other travel goodies delivered to your inbox each Friday)
• Follow Cassie on Twitter
• Spreading the word about the contest by sharing it on Twitter (you can do this once per day!)

The winner will be notified within 48 hours of the contest closing.

CLICK BELOW TO ENTER:

THE CONTEST HAS ENDED!

Do you currently backup your photos and other digital data? If so, how?