In our digital world, secure and high quality back-ups of your digital photos are a must. At the very least you should back up regularly to a second hard-drive so you have duplicate copies of each file. Better is to also back up to a portable hard-drive that you can keep off-location. I keep mine in a safety deposit box at my local bank.
Lately, another option for backups has become a very interesting concept for photographers: Back-ups on-line. These secure services are on highest quality servers and are monitored and continually backed-up. They prevent unauthorized entrance into your files.
PhotoShelter is one company, among a few others, offering such a service. Their storage solution is called the PhotoShelter Personal Archive system.
I like PhotoShelter Personal Archive for two main reasons:
1. The interface is user-friendly, making it a breeze to use.
2. You can opt for storage alone, or you can add e-commerce to couple it with selling your digital photos on-line through PhotoShelter.
Signing up for the ‘Starter Package’ is free. It provides you with an introductory 50MB of space. This is an excellent way to test it out and see if it is right for you and your particular workflow.
The bottom line: peace of mind.
The pricing for larger collections is affordable. The Basic Package offers 10GB of storage space and costs $9.99/month. The Pro version offers 100GB of storage space at an affordable $49.99/month. That’s not a lot of money to assure that you can sleep soundly at night knowing your digital files are safe and secure regardless of any catastrophe…, a power surge that zaps your equipment, your office gets flooded, a fire breaks out and all your computer equipment is toasted, your programs are attacked by a virus that corrupts your digital files. It happens.
On-line storage is all about peace of mind. There are a lot of very experienced pro photographers, who use Photo Shelter. Customer service is among the best I’ve ever seen from any company. Answers to questions are sent promptly to you, and follow-up questions are dealt with equal promptness and with great patience from the Photo Shelter customer service staff.
In addition to Personal Archive, PhotoShelter also offers a web portal where you can upload your files and sell them through the PhotoShelter Collection. The Collection is edited, and the editors decide which of the files you upload will be accepted.
With on-line backups of your digital files no longer being cost-prohibitive for individual photographers, the bottom line: peace of mind.
For more info see PhotoShelter’s web site.
Photojournalist Mikael Karlsson has 26 years’ experience of working for magazines and newspapers in more than 30 countries. He moved to the United States in 1998 from his native Sweden. He lives in Nebraska and is currently US correspondent for 11 Swedish magazines and writes a how to photograph column for PhotoStockNOTES.
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