In the film era, a "dupe" was a duplicate slide, made so the precious original could stay safe in a drawer while the copy went to a friend or onto the projector. The idea is just as sound for digital pictures. A single copy of anything, whether on one phone, one hard drive or one old slide, is one accident away from being lost.
Club Giardino is a journal and offers no copying or duplication service. Here is how to make sensible dupes yourself.
The basic rule: more than one copy, in more than one place
A widely followed approach is to keep at least three copies of anything important, on at least two different kinds of storage, with at least one copy kept away from home. In practice that might mean:
- the working copy on your computer;
- a second copy on an external drive kept in a drawer;
- a third copy in cloud storage or on a drive left with a family member.
For a household in Los Angeles, the off-site copy is not paranoia. It protects against theft, fire and the many smaller mishaps that can take out every device in one room.
Masters and copies
Keep an untouched master of every scan or original photo, ideally in a lossless format. Make edits, crops and resized versions as separate files. If a later edit goes wrong, you can always return to the master. Our Archiving page explains file formats and naming.
Physical originals
For slides, negatives and prints, the digital scan becomes your working dupe, and the originals can be retired to archival sleeves and boxes. Store them somewhere cool and dry; garages and attics can get very hot during the long dry season. Read more in Saving Old Family Slides.
Check your dupes
- Open a few files from each backup now and then to make sure they work.
- Replace aging drives before they fail, not after.
- Keep a simple note listing where every copy lives.
- When you add new photos, update every copy, not just one.
Garden photos count too
If you keep a garden journal in pictures, as described on our Garden Photos page, years of careful records can vanish with a single lost phone. Back them up on the same schedule as family pictures.
When sharing copies with relatives, see Sharing Photos Safely, and when you want to enjoy them together, plan a garden photo night.