Digital Home Thoughts: Don't Trust Anyone With Your Precious Images

"A recent e-mail from Eastman Kodak Co. didn't lead to a Kodak moment for Vanessa Daniele. It got her angry. On May 16, the company's Kodak Gallery online photo service will delete her picture albums unless she spends at least $4.99 by then and every year thereafter on prints and other products. That's the new rule for people whose photos take up less than 2 gigabytes of space on Kodak's servers - enough for around 2,000 1-megabyte photos. People over that limit must spend at least $19.99 a year. And customers who signed up under the old rules won't be given a pass."

I have a pretty simple rule when it comes to my photos, music, videos, documents, etc: redundancy and backups rule the day. And while putting things up in the cloud (online) is just great, it's simply foolish for that to be the only place they exist. I feel for anyone that gets trapped by service changes, but if you value your photos, placing your trust in an online service to protect and keep your images isn't smart.