Losing data in this day and age of technology should never happen.  Usually when data is lost it is due to a user being in a hurry or just  being careless.  I work as an IT Manager with a naton wide company and try to help our users as much as possible to keep their data intact.  I believe that prevention is one of the best ways to prevent people from losing data.  In a future post I will list some methods that can be implemented to preserve data in the business world.  But I would like to start with one of the most, correct that, THE worst case of lost data that I have come across, losing my wife's digital photos.

This happened before I was working full time in the IT field.  She had about 400 digital photos of our kids, family, and friends.  Some were just irreplaceable.  I thought that I was well organized setting up folders for her photos and labeling them in folders by date.  I had a few of them copied onto a disk but the majority of them were just saved on the hard drive.  Then one day the worst thing imaginable happened, the hard drive crashed.  The computer wouldn't boot and all I got the blue screen of death.  If I only knew then what I know now.  I was told that I had probably lost everything on the hard drive so I went out and bought a new hard drive and installed a new operating system on it.  I kept the hard drive for a while but eventually threw it out. 

My wife would have rather have lost her car or the house before losing her pictures.  To this day I still hear about losing those pictures.  Digital photography has improved greatly over the years but the same principles still apply today in taking precautions to save your data.  Here is what I would suggest you do to insure that this never happens to you!

1. First I take the memory card from the camera and copy the photos to a folder on the computer.  We use Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition 3.2 to store and edit our pictures.  This is a free download and it has some very useful utilities.  There are many other photo programs that you can purchase but I would suggest starting with this program since it is free and very useful.

2. I use an external hard drive to back up all of my data at regular intervals.  There are many types of external hard drives to choose from at all different price ranges.  I would like to review some of them in a future post.  Most of the middle of the road hard drives are sufficient. 

3. We then put the photos on a disc and keep the disc in an case and labeled appropriately.  When my wife wants prints of the images, she takes the card to our local drug store and uses the kiosk to print out the photos and sometimes she puts on a disk there also.  The kiosk can also make photo slide shows with music.  Prices there are very reasonable now.  I also occassionally use Nero to make slide shows but I don't always have the time so using the kiosk can be a quick alternative. 

4.  My wife always keeps the original memory card.  Even though she could reformat the card and use it again, this is the result of losing the photos when my hard drive crashed.  She still doesn't trust computers.  If all of the precautions above are used I would suggest that you could format the memory card instead of buying a new one.  Prices of memory cards have come down dramatically so if you feel more secure buying new cards then by all means do so.

This is just one small phase of data storage.  Due to my wifes photos and all of the financial data that we use at work, I have an extreme interest in data storage and recovery.  I will be discussing ways to prevent data loss and ways to recover it in the days to come.  One quick suggestion in closing.  There is a free downloadable program that will recover most lost data from external devices such as flash drives, digital photo memory cards, and hard drives.  The key word here is external.  The program is called "Zero Assumption Recovery" and can be found at http://www.z-a-recovery.com/  There is a four file recovery limit unless you purchase the full version but the free version is still very useful.

Please feel free to share any data storage and recovery hints as well as any horror stories that may have happened to you and or others.

Until next time!