While the bushfires were raging in Victoria, Australia, I’m sure many of us were thinking what would we take with us if we were in a hurry and we knew our house would probably burn down. Many think of their photo albums, but these days most of our photos are on the computer. Of course one could run with the hard disk, but rather bulky when you only have minutes to get out. An alternative is to have an extra external hard drive which would be easier to take.

We used to have CDs to back up our photos to and we still do, but how to find them in a hurry unless you are well organised? We also now have USB memory sticks but these items are also ones which cannot be in the house if you don’t have much time to get out.

The answer is to store them on someone else’s server.

If you have your own self hosted blog or web site, you can easily upload them via FTP (Filezilla is free) to your host, depending on the plan you have and how much room is there. They don’t have to link to your web site or blog;  just let them sit there. Create a folder called ‘photos’ on your host’s server. Of course, if you change your host remember to download all those photos to your own computer again. I lost quite a few photos by forgetting that once.

Then there is Flickr You can store as many photos as you like here and you don’t have to show them as public photos.

Everyone has an ISP. Most of these allow you to make a small web page for free. You could use that.

Also there is Google’s picasa - you can upload to this and make your photos private.

Off-site, online storage is really your best bet. Now, all you have to do is upload!

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