Preserving memories

So, the startup disk on my laptop is full... apparently it's not very big. Anyway I was finally sick of the errors popping up all the time that I thought oh I'll copy some photos to our external hard drive. I should be doing this monthly. I just realized the last time I copied any photos off my laptop (besides uploading to FB) was before we moved... well over a year ago!

There we go - 2010 done...

Now I'm just trying to get things copied over, almost frantic because something could (in theory) happen to them before I get everything copied. Also, it's taking forever. I have taken SO MANY photos in the last year alone. I'm glad to be getting to this before a real disaster - I would kick myself if I lost an entire year of precious moments captured on film - but by leaving it this long I've made a relatively easy thing into a huge project.

So when was the last time you backed things up? Do you have a strategy for how you store photos / videos and how often you copy them somewhere? Where do you keep them all?

Also... how often do you print photos? It's been forever since I've printed any. I used to LOVE sitting down and flipping through photo albums as a kid - something my kids don't really get to do. It would be nice to have a few albums of photos printed... just have to get through them all and do it. This is my Spring project! Sort out photos!

As of right now I'm about half-way through copying December 2010 over. I'm determined to get everything copied, and then I'll go through and print out a few hundred photos to put in an actual, put-on-the-table album with real plastic pages that my kids can sit down with on a Saturday morning and flip through, and say "I remember that!"...