Consumer Reports posts an article on the dangers of treating your online photo site as your sole backup of photos.
Do you have your photos securely backed up somewhere at home? Or, after you upload them to Snapfish, Flickr, Facebook, My Space or wherever, do you just erase them from your memory card? If you do the latter, you run the risk of losing them, or at least having to pay to get them back.
You might lose them because the site, like Kodak Gallery recently did, decides it will delete them after a period unless you buy at least a certain number of prints from that site every so often. (Sites with such policies may issue you a warning before they lower the ax, but if you miss that warning, it’s curtains for your shots.)
You might also lose your photos because the site goes belly up. Think that’s far-fetched? Not any more so than Fortunoff’s, Linens ‘n Things or Circuit City going bankrupt.
Even if your file doesn’t disappear entirely, you may have trouble retrieving a full-resolution version of it from a photo-sharing site without having to pay. On some sites, the only versions you can download for free are low-resolution ones.
Good advice. Keeping backups on an external hard drive, or backing up onto CD/DVD are both decent shorter-term options. Offsite backups are even better as a choice (or another copy); that’s one reason I’ve gotten so much into the online backup service Backblaze.
Finally, another option is the oldest-fashioned one of all — actual honest-to-garsh prints, which will last longer than some electronic media and, even better, aren’t dependent on technology standards that may not be around in decade or two. Something to consider for your most important photos.