There have been a rash of fires throughout the country. Some areas like Colorado are getting hit hard with wildfires that ravage hundreds of acres of  wild life.  Even worse, the fires have taken homes and lives.

My home state has had many fires, a majority of those fires have required mandatory evacuations of the residents living in the fire’s wake.    Evacuation for a fire or any other disaster is quick. Most are given 10 or 15 minutes to gather their things, and that is if they are lucky to be home when the evacuation orders are instated.

What do you grab when you are given 15 minutes? What is your most prized possessions? I asked co-workers, friends and family and most everyone lists photos as the most important thing to grab.

But I can’t help but think, what if I’m not at home to grab photos?

Backing up your photos in case of a disaster is not only nice to do, it is smart. Losing years of memories is devastating, but it can be prevented. If you can’t relate to losing your photos in a fire, then think about if your computer crashed and destroyed all of your digital photos, or if you had a flood and lost your hard copies. Backing up your photos is necessary to preserve your memories from any sort of disaster.

You have many options for backing up your photos from online storage to an external hard drive. Read on to determine which mode of photo preservation is right for you.
Hard Copies. Printed copies of your digital photos ensures that you are memories are in at least two places. If your computer crashes or gets lost, you will still have those memories in a tangible form. Printing your photos is easy and relatively inexpensive. You can either upload your digital photos online to a photo printing company’s website or bring film or a thumb drive to a physical location. Either way should cost you between 10-20 cents per print, plus developing costs of the film. The downside with printing off your photos is organizing them and making sure you have enough room.

External Hard Drive. An external hard drive is a small memory device. Its sole purpose is to hold data and information. An external hard drive is perfect to upload photos, music and other documents that are hard to replace. If your laptop or computer has issues, you can count on your external hard drive. External hard drives can be purchased at any computer or office store. The process is simple: insert the external hard drive (like you would a flash drive) and copy over the data you want saved.

Online Photo Storage. With the popularizing of digital things, online photo storage has been all the rage. Many sites offer online storage at one of their data servers for a low, yearly cost. You can copy over selected data or allow the site to copy any new files on your computer. The data can usually be accessed anywhere.

Whichever you decide, don’t wait for something bad to happen to back up your photos.