Back those photos up
The images were striking. Homes on the East Coast were washed away by Superstorm Sandy. People were in tears, picking up faded photographs, among their only remaining possessions.
If that doesn’t move you to get serious about safekeeping your lifetime of memories, what will? The digital age offers tools never imaginable before—including one-click access to a lifetime of family photos.
Here is a brochure on how to back up (存) your photos and save them online, where they can live forever and be accessible in good times and bad.
Scanning
The first step for those old photos is to scan them and save them to a digital format. Most printers come with scanners these days, so that’s an easy but extremely time-consuming step.
Storing the photos
With your scans in place, import the photos into your computer, and back them up.
You could make multiple copies of the disks and spread them to loved ones. Or you could choose external(外接的) hard drives or USB thumb drive, and add your photo and video collection from your computer.
Online backup
If you need lots of space, look at a pure online backup service, Caronite.
Caronite backs up 300 million files daily. Once you sign up, it starts to pick up everything you have on your hard drive. But photo collection on your computer’s main hard drive charges for $59 a year.
Cloud Storage
For folks who don’t need automatic backup, but instead want to take a more active approach, Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft’s SkyDrive let you store files online by yourself, share and instantly access them. All offer free options—2GB of free storage for Dropbox, 5GB for Google and 7GB for SkyDrive. But if you want more, you need to pay.
Bottom Line
The hard drive or flash drive is the cheapest and easiest. But drives can fail. Online services are more expensive, but more secure. With more of us switching back and forth between our computers, such services are the best way to get access to our data from wherever we are.
小题1:Why does the author mention Superstorm Sandy?
A．To tell the background of the scanning photos.
B．To attract the readers’ interest in the backups.
C．describe a severe natural disaster.
D．To win the readers’ sympathy.小题2:What can we know from the passage?
A．Scanning photos takes little time but costs a lot.
B．Caronite charges for backing up photos from hard drive.
C．Google Drive offers unlimited free photo storage on line.
D．The hard drive or flash drive is the cheapest and safest.小题3:Which of the following allows storing files automatically?
A．Caronite.
B．Dropbox.
C．SkyDrive.
D．Flash drive.小题4:What’s the passage mainly about ?
A．tell real stories about storage services
B．introduce some of the storage services
C．describe the functions of storage services
D．argue about the advantage of storage services
