4. Back Up Your Collection

Once you've scanned and corrected your collection, don't let a house fire or faulty hard drive obliterate your work. Back it up.

"Today, storage is so cheap, there's no excuse not to do backup," says John Larish of Jonrel Imaging Consultants in Rochester, N.Y. "Terabyte [1,000-gigabyte] hard drives are now affordable [under $200]. I remember the first IBM one-gigabyte card, costing $1,000 each."

Make your backups automatic and redundant, Larish advises. "I store my photos three ways—on my computer's internal hard drive, on an external hard drive, and off premises. I also burn DVDs of my images. I guess that's four ways."

You can set up your Windows XP or Vista operating system to automatically back up selected files or folders to another drive on a schedule. Or, for better performance, choose a third-party software program, such as Home Genie Backup Manager or Backup Now 5 . For online backup (immune to computer theft or house fires), three reasonably priced (about $50 a year) choices are SOS Online Backup, Carbonite, and Mozy, which offers two gigs of storage for free. With all these products, you choose which folders to back up. Set it and forget it.

Oh, except for the fact that, as Larish points out, you need to migrate your home backup files, over time, to the latest storage media, whatever they may be. "Remember Zip disks?" he says, referring to a storage product that was common in the late 1990s but is now all but obsolete.