On today's show Roland wanted to discuss ideas for preserving your precious memories - specifically photos. The idea was thought of due to the fires in CA. Many people have valuables they could replace BUT photos is not one of them, so here are some tips for you to digitize and backup your photos:

To digitize printed photos you need to either:

1.buy a scanner (as low as $75). A scanner connects to your computer and works like a photocopier, you place the photo on the glass, press start and your computer captures the image, then you can save the image on your computer or to an external drive for safekeeping.

 2. if you dont want to buy a scanner you could take your photos to a photo development store and have them scan them for you or use their self-service scanner . More than likely this option will cost more money in the long run depending on the amount of photos you want to scan.

If you have alot of negatives you may want to shop for a scanner that can scan negatives as well as prints.

Once you have digitized your images now you need to store them. Storing on your computer is fine BUT you should absolutely have a backup of your files located somewhere else. For example you could buy an external hard drive these drives range in cost and have come down tremendously in price. These drives range in price from $75.00 to $300 or more depending on how much storage space you want. Just remember you don't buy storage for today you buy for tomorrow so if you can afford it my minimum recommendation is to by a 250 gig drive.  Another option for backing up your files is to place them online with a service like www.Xdrive.com they will store up to 5 Gig of data for free.

Bottom line: Make sure you have your photos stored on your pc and have them backed up somewhere else like an external hard drive or an online service. My preference is an external hard drive that you place at a family member or friends house. No use in having a backup in the same location as your pc, this way you are covered if something was to happen to your home.

 Websites for you to look into are:

http://www.Xdrive.com

http://picasa.google.com/ 

http://ourstory.com/