In times of disaster, when all is lost, the one thing people mourn most is the loss of their photos and albums.

Many of these photos are unique family heirlooms. We heard it repeatedly with the recent hurricane disasters, when thousands of people lost everything.

We recommend you scan your family photos and pages and save them onto CDs. Even with a small scanner that scans letter-size sheets, we’ve show how to scan a 12” x 12” page in two halves, use a stitching program and save it as a 12” x 12” file.

We’ve heard of people who keep their backup CDs in safety deposit boxes. In a situation like what happened in New Orleans, that wasn’t a guarantee of safety. We recommend going one step further.

Save your family photos onto a CD, and make it a gift. With some printers you can print directly onto a special inkjet printable CD. Customize it with photos and text. Once you’ve created one, you can print many more. Why not burn and send a CD to a bunch of family members? How much safer is that? If you’ve got relatives spread all over the country, or the world, you’ll have photo backups all over.

Do the same thing with your scrapbooking pals. Save your pages onto CDs, print a bunch of copies, and send them to friends for safekeeping. You can each return the favor and store CDs for one another.

If disaster should strike, at least you will know that you do have your photos and pages saved in multiple safe places and that yes, they can be replaced with the help of your trusty photo printer.

Materials/Equipment used
Scanner
R1800 printer