Do you have a Swiss Bank Account?

Images © Swiss Picture Bank.com

How many times have you lost your cherished photos from your computer because your hard drive crashed or you accidentally deleted them with a single click? Or you have forgotten to back them up to CDs or an external drive? Perhaps your computer has succumbed to a virus attack.

With the age of digital photography clearly upon us now in every way, from cheap digicams to phone cameras, we shoot everything more freely now than ever before. The consequence? With ever increasing megapixel counts to cheaper memory cards, we now have gigabytes of photos and these fill up our laptops and PCs quickly. How many of us actually backup our photos to DVDs regularly? DVDs are great but can you be bothered to search through the hundreds or thousands of images you have taken to find the one shot of Aunt May dressed as a clown at your niece's birthday party?

Enter one very neat solution, that is, the web based Swiss Picture Bank. Now, online storage isn't really new, after all, Apple has its (subscription required) remote iDisk for many years now and many other web-based photo sites like flickr and picasa. The main difference with the Swiss setup is that for 3 cents per image, they guarantee to preserve your pictures for at least 30 years or they pay you 30X for each picture they loose!

It doesn't sound very much, but if you have several thousands preserved photos with them that could add up.

This is their blurb :

"With a Swiss Picture Bank account you can make sure these memories last forever. There's no more wondering where they are on your hard drive, no more struggling to transfer them to a new computer, no more discovering they are trapped on an old disk that you can no longer read. Best of all, your photos are protected against hard drive crashes, accidental deletion, lost CDs/ laptops, viruses, fire and water damage.

Swiss Picture Bank is the online savings account for your pictures.

When you upload photos to Swiss Picture Bank, you're doing much more than storing them on the web. We make multiple copies of every picture, encrypt them and secure them on redundant servers housed in data centers located throughout Switzerland. And we don't use just any data centers, we use facilities operated by Swisscom IT Services, the leading provider of outsourced IT services to Swiss banks.

Once your photos are uploaded to Swiss Picture Bank, they are accessible from any computer at any time. If you ever want to retrieve a picture, all you have to do is login to your password-protected account and download it. And of course you can also print, share, organize or view your photos online using the intuitive account interface. It's that simple - and that safe."

The site also has a downloadable photo management program to allow easy up and downloading of your photos to its site. This all sounds like a brilliant idea if storage is a problem for you.

Do let me know how it goes if any of you decide to give it a try. For now, I backup my files to an external drive and DVDs.