Instruction manual

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6.6 Backup and Archive Photos
Back up and protect your photos by burning them to a CD or DVD (for CAP
purposes, a CD burner is a valuable and inexpensive asset), or copy them to an
external hard drive or thumb drive. If the customer doesn’t get (or deletes) your
upload/e-mail or they lose an photo, you can always retrieve the photo from the
archived file.
USB thumb (flash) drives have become so inexpensive (e.g., < $12 for 4 GB
and < $30 for 16 GB) that they make an excellent backup drive. They also
provide a good way to transport photos to your customer (better than CD/DVD).
They can also be bought in bulk.
CDs or DVDs are lightweight, inexpensive, durable, and easy to store, mail or
transport. They can be labeled and organized in any way you want, making it
simple to create CDs/DVDs of a complete mission to mail, for safekeeping, or to
free up valuable space on the computer.
Most CDs have can hold 700MB, and are very inexpensive when bought in
bulk. DVDs are essentially a bigger, faster CD that can hold tons of still photos
and two hours of high-quality digital video (a double-sided, dual-layer disc can
hold about 8 hours of high-quality video, or 30 hours of VHS quality video).
Unless you plan to back-up or edit video, CDs will suffice for most CAP purposes.
When purchasing a package of CDs or DVDs to store photos, it’s important to
know the different kinds of blank CDs/DVDs you can buy. The one you want
depends on whether the computer has a -R or a -RW drive: [Note: This is greatly
simplified; there are many different types of competing formats.]
• CD/DVD-R. These can be written to but not erased. Once your photos
reside on an -R disc they can be read many, many times, and you can’t
accidentally write over existing photos. This makes them the ideal
medium for storing your pictures long-term. While you can’t reuse them,
they are less expensive than -RW discs.
• CD/DVD-RW. These can be written to, erased, and written to again,
much like a floppy disk or the hard drive in your computer. As a result, it
is possible to accidentally write over a collection of original photos stored
on an -RW. That makes this type of CD/DVD better suited for other
backup tasks. It also takes longer to write to an -RW disc than to an -R.
Many CD/DVD players can read all of the +/- format types.
Additionally, you can get up to 2GB of free backup from online services such
as Mozy (
http://mozy.com) or IDrive (www.idrive.com).