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Backing Up Embroidery Designs

We Carry
by Sara Snuggerud in Sewing Tips

Have you ever lost all your saved pictures, personal financial information or embroidery design due to a computer crash?

Worse. Feeling. EVER!

Let’s focus on embroidery designs for today’s conversation.

These days no one is safe, but there are simple ways to protect your downloaded embroidery designs so you do not have to hunt for them all over the Internet in the unfortunate event of a computer crash. But what is the best option?

We asked a variety of online embroidery users what they used and the answers were all over the board. Many of them also shared tragic stories of what they had thought was a good saving method but it later failed them miserably.

Mary Jensen said she “used an external hard drive. Over 30,000 designs and all my class handouts and patterns were kept there. Then one sad day I dropped it on a tile floor, and all of it was lost. Now everything goes to the cloud and a new steel external hard drive.”

The conciseness of embroidery users back up their embroidery designs to one of the following places:

  • USB sticks
  • CD’s
  • External hard drives
  • The Cloud
  • 
DropBox

The benefit of saving to an online location such as to the Cloud or DropBox is that it can be accessed from any computer anywhere in the world.

USB sticks are OK, but they can go kaput without any warning.

Our Sioux Falls customer Susan D. shared with us that she “uses a 5 TB (terabyte) Portable External Hard Drive. I actually have three. One for home and one goes into the bank safety deposit box with important paper work and the third is used during the rotation.

The nice thing about storing embroidery designs is that they are actually a very tiny, tiny file size. You can store thousands of embroidery designs and barely take up any room at all. Now sorting through thousands of embroidery designs could be painful if they are not properly organized.

Great Tip: If you save files on your personal computer you can set it up to automatically back up all files to a desired online location. This is a great option. The automatic saving to the Cloud allows for regular backups for up-to-date security.

At Heirloom Creations we hear tragic stories of loosing everything from time to time. Do not get caught in the “wish I should of backed up my computer” tragedy.

No matter what you pick, pick something! Safe guard your precious embroidery designs and other important items so they are always at your finger tips should a computer crash ever happen.