It’s fun sharing historic photos like this one, which I shot at last night’s World Series finale. Preserving the additional thousands of post-season shots I took at Yankee Stadium over the past few weeks may not be fun, but it’s important because it will let me mine that photo collection for all sorts of purposes for years.

There are numerous ways to create backups of important files. For a brief overview, see our video on computer backups (embedded below). Our computer backup system buying guide (available for subscribers) provides much more detailed advice along with brand-name recommendations of systems we’ve tested.

Since I back up a lot of photos and prefer quick access to them, I use external hard drives.

(Storing them externally also keeps my computer’s internal hard drive from becoming cluttered with image files.) And because I always make at least two backup copies of important photos (in case one set of copies is lost) before I delete them from the camera’s memory card, I use two drives.

To back up my thousands of post-season shots, after each game, I copied the shots from that game to a 1.5-terabyte (TB) external hard drive. Then I copied those files from that external hard drive to a second, more portable 500GB external drive. (I have a computer at a distant geographical location, so I occasionally take the smaller, portable drive with me and copy photos to the hard drive on that off-site computer.) Only then did I delete the photos from the memory card.

This approach may not be for everybody. If your needs are more modest, an inexpensive thumb drive or writeable DVD might serve just as well.

If you have tips to share on how you preserve your photo files, post them below. —Jeff Fox