Burning CD/DVD Copies of Your Memories

Now that you’ve organized your hard drive, it’s a good idea to regularly create back-up copies of those family photos and family stories captured via audio and video. Why? As great as technology is, there’s always a chance that something could go wrong. You don’t want to lose those valuable memories of friends, family, graduations or holiday gatherings in the event that your computer crashes or hard drive freezes.

Lucky for us, most computers today come equipped with a CD burner and many have a DVD burner too. Another plus: they are easy to use.

Once you’ve organized your family memories using the date folder system we outlined in Organizing Your Hard Drive, making copies of your precious memories is easy. Just so you know how many CDs/DVDs you’ll need, the storage specs are such: CDs typically hold 700MB of data and DVDs hold 4.7GB.

Depending upon the size of the various subfolders (and whether or not you can burn a DVD), you could burn a back-up copy of each year, which would include all of the month subfolders and event subfolders. If you have a lot of memories taking up a lot of space (such as a lot of family videos) you may have to break up the back-up copies by months.

Like we said, most computers come equipped with software that will allow you to burn or create the backup disks of your family memories. Windows for example uses Windows Media Player to allow you to create a data disk. Mac also has an easy to use program that recognizes when a blank disk is inserted into the computer and has easy steps for you to follow.

Once you’ve burned back-up disks of those precious family memories, make sure you label them with the appropriate dates so that you can reference them as necessary. You may also want to capture or note the date you created the disk. As time goes by, you’ll probably create multiple back-ups and can get rid of the older backups to reduce duplicates.

While these backup discs serve a practical purpose, you may also want to think about making duplicate copies for family members or friends. After all, these memorable moments are for everyone to share.