It’s Erica (pne123) here posting this week’s Tips & Tricks. My last post for the Beginner’s Corner focused on my design process from selecting the photo, finding the perfect color scheme, the journaling and finishing off with the title. This time I’m stepping away from the actual scrapping of the page and want to share with you my OCD file management technique and backing up process in case you are still not sure how to manage your own photos.

We have a pretty extensive home network as both my husband and I have work computers as well as personal laptops. A few years ago we upgraded our personal systems to laptops and decided to keep one of our desktop as our server where we keep all our critical documents, family photos and my layouts. We then invested in an external hard drive so we could do weekly backups of main server. Our external hard drive is stored off-site so if we have had a home fire, flood, etc our family photos and other critical documents would be saved.

I’ve heard so many times over the past several years of systems crashing and people losing all data and it always makes me feel sick to think something like that could happen to us, so I’m really a ‘nag’ when it comes to having a systematic backup process. My poor husband has to put up with it all, but he does it with a smile.

Here are some additional details on my photo file management process:

1. Make sure to download all the photos from my card a minimum of 2 times per week.

2. Organize the photos by Year/Month/Date. My file structure looks something like:

2008

—01_Jan_08

—–01_01

—–01_02

2009

—01_Jan_09

etc….

3. Once or twice a month we back up the photos on the external hard drive.

4. Since I’m a FREAK and PARANOID about losing my pictures we actually maintain 2 backups. So we make sure to synch these once a month.

We’ve chosen to use external hard drives as our backup, however, there are several online backup services available that many of my friends have used. Here are a couple of links which highlight some off the online backup options.

http://www.onlinebackupsreview.com/

http://www.backupreview.info/

Hope sharing my OCD methods have helped those of you still wondering if and how you should start backing up your treasured photos!