Catholic and Loving it!

This is a public service announcement...

It's not a question of if your hard drive will fail. It's a question of when. All hard drives fail in the end.

Pretty much everybody I know bought a digital camera in the last year or so. Pretty much everybody I know has only one copy of their photos on their PC at home. In a few years time, people are going to start phoning me up in tears asking if I know how to fix their poor old computer because all the photos are on it.

I probably won't be able to help. Photos of babies and children and holidays and loved ones will be gone.

What to do?

Between us, Ella and I have 40,000 digital photos. That's a lot, but our photos only take up 60GB of hard drive space. Yours probably take less than 20GB.

Go to your computer store of choice. ebuyer or Amazon (or PC World if you must) and look for a thing called a "Portable Hard Drive" or an "External Hard Drive". Anything over 100GB will do the job. If you really want to plan for the future then go for a 250GB one.

I got one of these because it has a 5 year warranty instead of the usual two but at 500GB it's bigger than you need. £65 may seem steep, but I paid £78 last summer and when you lose all your photos you'll be telling me how you'd give anything to get them back.

You plug it in to your computer and it appears under 'My Computer' just like an extra floppy disk drive. Then you copy your photos over to it. I said COPY. Not CUT. Not MOVE. COPY! You want to have TWO copies. Why not put your important work on there as well and your music and anything else you'll be gutted about losing.

I bought two drives. We have three copies. One on my computer, one on the external hard drive and a third copy on another external hard drive at work. If our house burns down, copies our photos are safe at work.

Nobody is paying me to say this. I'm trying to avoid tears. Because I'm a very nice man.