Have you noticed that your collection of family videos is starting to pile up? If you’re just storing it on your desktop you may also be aware that it isn’t all that safe, and if anything happens to your hard drive you could very well lose everything.
Use the 3-2-1 Backup Rule
To make sure your family videos are safe and almost completely eliminate the risk that they’ll be lost, you should use the 3-2-1 backup rule. It basically requires that you have:
- 3 copies of the videos in total
- 2 copies stored on different types of media
- 1 copy stored in a different location
The multiple copies prescribed by this rule will help ensure that even if one copy of your videos is lost, you can retrieve the other copies to restore it. The 2 copies on different media will help ensure the same failure can’t take out multiple copies at the same time, and the 1 copy stored in a different location will safeguard against fire, flooding, and other disasters.
In practice, this rule is quite easy to apply. Aside from the copy of your videos on your desktop, you could create a second copy and store it on an external hard drive. As further copy to be stored in a different location could be an external hard drive that you take into your office or cloud storage.
Take Advantage of Cloud Storage
Cloud storage is actually a really good idea to store family videos. Not only will it act as an offsite backup, but it will also make it convenient to access the videos.
In fact, you can even give other family members access and share the videos with them – but just make sure they don’t have permission to delete anything.
The only downside of using cloud storage is its cost. Generally, cloud storage services charge based on the amount of storage that is required, and considering video file sizes can be quite large – that could add up.
It can help to compress videos, and for example, you may want to use a QuickTime to MP4 converter or compress to other formats such as HEVC.
Keep Everything Organized
Another step that you want to take to keep your family videos safe and allow them to be accessed conveniently is to keep them organized.
Right from the start you should come up with some sort of organization structure, and sort your videos into folders as well as use the same naming convention for their filenames. Once you do it should be easier to find the videos you need, and keep track of them too.
Conclusion
That should cover everything that you need to do to store your family videos safely and conveniently. It may take time to set it all up initially, but once you do it will just be a case of backing up all the new videos that you record from time to time – which can even be done automatically in some cases.
Photo by delfi de la Rua on Unsplash
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