No matter your background or interests, there’s one thing you likely share with a lot of people out there: A love of photos. Without knowing you personally, we’re going to take a guess that you have snapped a selfie in the past 24 hours (after all, there are millions that hit the net every day). But we’re not only training the lens on ourselves. These days, the proliferation of photo-enhancing technology offered by platforms like Instagram means pretty much everybody can take a decent picture. And so we do.
“We love our photos – so let’s make sure we hold onto them.”
It is not enough to just experience something yourself – you have to visually represent it for others (as well as for yourself, a few years down the line). Visually representing our experiences is a human practices that predates the emergence of photography by about 40,000 years. Ever since cave paintings first emerged in prehistoric Asia and Europe, we have had an innate need to preserve our lives for posterity.
But although visual mediums have advanced with the passage of time, the means of preserving their products have arguably regressed. Cave paintings, after all, are still intact after thousands of years, whereas that photo you took last week that disappeared from your cloud – not so much.
Our photos are invaluable to us – so we need to protect them.Correcting an atmosphere of vulnerability
Cavemen 40,000 years ago had a lot of things to worry about, but having their cave paintings stolen by hackers was not one of them. Today, our photos are far more vulnerable due to the potency of threats in cyberspace and the risk of hardware failures. Back in September, a highly publicized incident involving the leaking of compromising celebrity photos from their personal iCloud accounts illustrated for everyone who takes photos just how easily a snapshot can be stolen.
But it is not just photo theft that shutterbugs have to worry about – it’s also the possibility of losing your photos forever. If, for instance, you are one of the many people who doesn’t backup his or her computer and that computer suffers a hard drive failure, then you can say goodbye to all the photos you had on it. However, this does not need to become your predicament. By following these steps, you can hold onto your photos forever:
- Protect them: The celebrity photo scandal taught us that storing photos in the public cloud probably isn’t the way to go if we want to keep them free of hackers. But storing them other places can be problematic too if your entire network is not properly defended. That’s why it’s imperative to protect your system with an all-encompassing security solution like Unlimited Security. By defending all your devices in a broad way, you significantly limit the chances of an intruder gaining access to your photos.
- Back them up: There is a reason why those hacked celebrities were using a public cloud to store their photos: Because on the surface, it seems like the safer thing to do. After all, photos stored solely on your computer are going to end up lost forever if, say, your hard drive gives out. But where the celebrities – and many others – go wrong is by choosing the wrong online platform. It’s not a public cloud that’s going to give you the backup you need for your photos – it’s a private online backup solution accessible only to you.
With these steps in mind, you won’t have to worry about losing your photos or having them revealed to the rest of the world.
