Storing your photographs on your hard drive or in their original albums is not enough to keep them safe. While this may work for a few years, preserving your heritage for grandchildren and future generations requires a lot more planning.

Not only are your photographs at risk of theft and fire, but files get corrupted, formats change, and storage media like floppy disks and CDs have limited lives.

It’s a universal problem: museums, art institutes and governments spend millions of dollars each year researching ways to preserve information. The U.S Constitution on display at the National Archives in Washington DC has faded almost beyond recognition. Even though the original copy has a limited number of years before completely disappearing, the information is in no danger of being lost. So many copies of the document are in existence that even a nuclear war cannot destroy them all.