Back those photos up The images were striking. Homes on the East Coast were washed away by Superstorm Sandy. People were in tears, picking up faded photographs, among their only remaining possessions. If that doesn’t move you to get serious about safekeeping your lifetime of memories, what will? The digital age offers tools never imaginable before—including one-click access to a lifetime of family photos. Here is a brochure on how to back up (存) your photos and save them online, where they can live forever and be accessible in good times and bad. Scanning The first step for those old photos is to scan them and save them to a digital format. Most printers come with scanners these days, so that’s an easy but extremely time-consuming step. Storing the photos With your scans in place, import the photos into your computer, and back them up. You could make multiple copies of the disks and spread them to loved ones. Or you could choose external(外接的) hard drives or USB thumb drive, and add your photo and video collection from your computer. Online backup If you need lots of space, look at a pure online backup service, Caronite. Caronite backs up 300 million files daily. Once you sign up, it starts to pick up everything you have on your hard drive. But photo collection on your computer’s main hard drive charges for $59 a year. Cloud Storage For folks who don’t need automatic backup, but instead want to take a more active approach, Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft’s SkyDrive let you store files online by yourself, share and instantly access them. All offer free options—2GB of free storage for Dropbox, 5GB for Google and 7GB for SkyDrive. But if you want more, you need to pay. Bottom Line The hard drive or flash drive is the cheapest and easiest. But drives can fail. Online services are more expensive, but more secure. With more of us switching back and forth between our computers, such services are the best way to get access to our data from wherever we are. 小题1:Why does the author mention Superstorm Sandy?
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