The second part of my blog about protecting your memories is all about backing up your images! It's a quick one, but I feel it's important enough to warrant it's own post.

backing up - yawn but pay attentionyawning newborn baby photographed in black & white Now, let's be honest, whilst it's important I realise it is quite boring.

It's something you may not even think about until a hard-drive crashes or your phone dies and you use months, or worse, years of photos.

Again, this is a symptom of our digital age where everyone has a camera phone in their pocket. We take more photos than ever, but we don't print them and we don't always protect them.

I'd like you to ask yourself this: if your phone was lost, stolen or died today, how many photos are on it that you don't have copies of elsewhere?

backing up - boring but importantblack and white photograph of a grumpy boy I've seen it happen to friends and family, and it can be devastating if your phone contains photos of your baby's first steps, or a special day out that you won't repeat. Even if it's just every day photos, if you lose a year's worth, that's a big gap in your photographic memories.

I recommend to my clients that they keep their images in three places:

• on their PC/ main tablet device
• on an external device such as a USB, external hard drive or their phone
• in a cloud back-up

This should cover you for all eventualities of loss.

With client images I take back-ups very seriously - my job isn't done when I leave a family photoshoot or wedding, I upload the images from my memory cards to my hard drive, then back them up to an external hard drive and a cloud back-up service, so before the day is over four copies of your images exist.

When I hand them over to you, although I keep a copy, I ask you to follow the steps above to ensure you don't lose your images.

External hard drives with a terrabyte of storage can be purchased from around £40, which is usually enough to store a lifetime of personal photos.

There are a number of cloud back-up services available from Google to Amazon to Apple - many are included free with another subscription so you may already have access to these.

I use iDrive for my business and personal photos and can highly recommend it - it backs up from both my PC and my mobile.

So that's it... it's quick and not that exciting, but please take action and ensure you don't lose your precious memories.

Oh, and a reminder of last week's message - please print your photos too - it's another way of ensuring you never lose them.

If you've any questions or would like advice about printing or storing your photos, please feel free to contact me.