If you're reading this blog, chances are you're like us: you love taking your family out camping and cherish the memories you create each time you head out. You probably even have any number of photos, capturing the ever expanding outdoor adventures of your family. Your kids first hike, the first fish they caught, first deer bagged, first peak bagged, etc. But have you ever thought about the sense of terror that would rip out your gut if you logged onto your computer to look through your family pictures, but instead only found an empty file structure? Just a shell sitting there, allowing you to click through them, staring unbelievably at empty folders. Yep, you guessed it. That happened to me tonight. Fortunately, my terror was minimized as I had just recently finished backing up all of our family photos on SmugMug.com. About a year ago, a colleague of mine lost all of the pictures of their children. They paid a ton of money and were eventually able to recover them, but it took over a year during which they were constantly thinking they had lost all of their memories of the first years of their kids lives. In addition, I think they ended up paying around $500. That was the warning shot for me. Previously I had always 'known' I should back-up our photos, and once I even managed to burn some cd's (although I couldn't tell you where they are now). After watching the emotional toll on my colleague, I decided I needed to get off my lazy backside and take some action.

After researching a number of options, I decided on SmugMug.com. For a reasonable price ($39.95 for a standard subscription), you can back up all of your photos. Unlimited storage space, unlimited traffic, nice layout and features. It has great community support and integration with various applications (Lightroom, Elements, etc.) and web pages (Flickr, etc.). A number of community members have created and shared applications to make uploading and downloading pictures a breeze. In fact, I'm using one right now to start pulling back down all of our pictures! I've also used SmugMug to make pictures of my kid's soccer teams available to all the parents on the teams. I can password protect the site and they can order pictures and other products right from the gallery (no markup or profit, just at cost).

The power of the options is unlimited. Having your pictures come back to you, priceless.

So, how did I lose my pictures anyhow? I'm not sure, but here is my best bet. I had downloaded a trial of Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 and used it a couple of times during the 30 day trial period. I even extended the trial period once, as I hadn't really been able to try it out during the first 30 days. After using it a bit, I decided not to purchase it and uninstalled it from my machine. Tonight, the only folders left with pictures in them were those that I created after the last time I used the trial product. My only thought is that the product had cataloged the other photos and, somehow, for some reason, deleted all the photos when it was uninstalled. I have no idea if this is what really happened, and I have no idea why it would leave the folder structure but wipe the photos, but I'm really glad I had the photos backed up. I only lost one month of the lives of my kids (I was lazy and didn't get it backed up) and of that month, some of my favorite photos are on this blog site. Albeit at a reduced resolution, but they exist none the less.

In case your wondering, my photos of the various CEJCamping trips were backed up on SmugMug as well. Whew. Although I would rather face the guys after telling them I'd lost our pictures than my wife after saying I'd lost the pictures of our kids. After pulling them back down, I'm thinking of throwing them of an USB flash drive that I can put into our safety deposit box as well.

With something this important, you can never have too many back-ups. If you don't have one, get one. As Eric would say: trust me.