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A tip for keeping your pictures safe on your computer
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By (user no longer on site) OP
over a year ago
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This is a very simple little tip
Keep all your pictures in one place, preferably on an external drive or large memory key (external drives would be preferable as memory keys can be a bit “volatile” and you could lose your data) however don’t make a point of hiding that drive or locking it away as that may indicate you have something to hide on it.
Make a folder, call it “backups” and inside that folder make another one called “data” or something equally boring. Place all your pictures in that folder, and if you are saving editing or otherwise working with them always make sure they go back in there (or save directly to it)
Once you have everything in place, use a compression program such as WinRAR – this allows you to compress them all into one file and set a password for your archives as well as an option for hiding the file names so if somebody tries to preview the archive they won’t see any names that you may have used on them.
As long as you don’t use a password that somebody might guess or you forget, your pictures will be safe from prying eyes as WinRAR archives are fairly difficult to “crack”
Once you have compressed the pictures you need to delete the originals – use a program like file shredder to completely remove any trace of the pictures (you would be surprised what can be recovered from PC hard drives these days…
As I said, a fairly simple and basic security precaution you can of course do a lot more, but that should be enough for most people |
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By (user no longer on site) OP
over a year ago
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"Any tips on how to get files back from a crashed external..."
Depends, if the drive is "ticking" or making any sort of noise then it's unlikely 
Strange noises from drives usually means the heads are making heavy contact with the discs and that's not good.
Sometimes though it's simply the USB control card in the external case or the controller card on the drive itself that has failed, normally in this case the drive nor case seem to do anything - the lights are on but nobody is home
If the drive is completely silent then you may be lucky - get the case open (break it if needs be, it's not much use now anyway) and inside you should find a standard IDE or SATA hard drive and the control circuit board - unplug the drive from the power leads and board and then Simply put that drive into another computer as a 2nd drive and see what happens.
If nothing again, and the drive is still silent, then I would suspect the drive control card is gone, then you may be able to find one on ebay that is EXACTLY the same and replace it (could cost a few quid though) and try again.
I have a mate who works on these things, if you get stuck I can put you in touch. |
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Great idea South Down Bloke. Another thing you can do is download software called MyLockbox. It's basically a vault for files etc and you can password it (use a decent password with symbols, numbers and letters) and nobody can open the files. The files or folders don't sit anywhere on your computer. They can only be accessed when you open the software and input your password. Great for safely storing pics or videos of yourself or of "favourite friends!" |
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By (user no longer on site) OP
over a year ago
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These "cloud" services (another one is dropbox) are great but what you also need to watch out for are "cached" files - that is, when you view the pictures on your PC (or any other for that matter) your operating system downloads them into a disk cache and leaves them there for faster access later on. Always always clean your internet browsers cache and/or history after use |
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you obviously know what you are doing south down bloke. i have a prob with pics that downloaded from camera and the y open in microsoft office 10. i cant send them as a email attchment or anything. any ideas?
thanks |
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By (user no longer on site) OP
over a year ago
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Sounds like your file associations have changed. I don't know what way you are downloading them, but the simplest way is to plug your camera into your pc (or put the memory card in if it has a card reader) and don't allow any program to automatically download them for you. Then, using windows own file explorer, go to the files and copy/paste them into a folder on your computer.
From there, "Right Click" on one of the images and choose "open with" from the menu - choose windows photo viewer from the list and make sure the box "always use this program" is ticked and hit enter/ok
This will mainly work for standard .jpg pictures, if your camera is saving everything in raw (NEF/CR2 for Nikon/Canon etc) then you may need to download a file viewer from the camera makers web site. |
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