Protect your videos, photos and documents in 2024!

We are sure you’re aware that various disasters destroy numerous homes and businesses across the world every year. The total amount of property damage caused by these disasters is unbelievable, but in most cases insurance coverage helps the people affected at least rebuild their homes and businesses so they can move on with their lives.

Unfortunately, many families lose other precious things to them other than the structures they live and work in…All of their precious Videos, photos and other irreplaceable documents.

Even the largest insurance company cannot replace photos of loved ones who have passed on or letters sent from a beloved one. Once those most treasured items are lost, they are gone forever.

That’s why a box in the back room or your computer’s hard drive should never be used as the only long-term storage option for photos and important documents that can never be replaced if something should ever to happen to it.

As we have entered a new year, We strongly recommend that you take measures right away to ensure the long-term existence of your photos, videos and other important documents. Here’s how:

1. Scan all of the physical printed photos and other irreplaceable documents in your home or office to your computer and then follow the steps listed below.

2. Make a full backup of your computer’s hard drive. That way you’ll be able to quickly recover if your hard drive ever goes belly up on you. And be sure to make fresh backups at regular intervals.

Our next post explains how to create a System Image Backup in Windows 10 as well as if your PC is running Windows 11. If you have a MacBook, you can click here.

Once you have a current backup, store that external hard drive in a fireproof safe or safety deposit box.

3. Copy all of the precious family/Friend photos and important documents that currently stay on your computer onto USB flash drives. Then you can Distribute copies of that media to other family members, and if possible be sure to include people who don’t live in the same house (or even better, the same city)

That way if someone’s house were to burn down there will still be several copies of those files stored in various physical locations.

4. Upload all of your irreplaceable files to a dependable cloud storage account such as Google Drive, Dropbox or iCloud to ensure that no matter what happens to you flash drive copies and hard drives you still have an online backup that can be recovered as many times as needed.

*Upload all the photos from your mobile devices to the cloud as well.

If you have an Apple device you can upload to iCloud. Android users can choose one of several cloud storage solutions, including Google’s own Google Drive.

Now you know how to protect the files that you simply can’t afford to lose from almost any type of catastrophic event. It can be time consuming and even a bit costly to take the measures required to truly protect all of your precious photos and important documents from permanent loss.

However, if you ever lose a hard drive or flash drive…you’ll be really glad that you did it step up and get the online backups.