Here are the most common threats to digital photos. Swiss Picture Bank takes care of them all.

It's not a matter of if - it's a matter of when. Your hard drive will crash - and it can happen at any time. File recovery after a killer crash is always expensive and never guaranteed.

Monthly or yearly subscription plans inherently threaten your photos; if you miss a payment, they will be deleted. The same is true for services with minimum purchase requirements. Your photos are only as safe as your next payment.

No company is safe from the threat of business failure. When a photo storage service goes under, all of its users lose their photos forever. The money, time and energy you spent taking and saving your pictures will be wasted.

Accidental deletions are one of the leading contributors to data rot. A single wrong keystroke or dropped storage device can delete years of beautiful photos in a single instant.

Every storage device becomes obsolete - rapid technological advances will render them incompatible with newer hardware after just a few years. Constantly updating your system and transferring files can be expensive and time consuming. And if you don't spend the money and put in the effort, your photos can be trapped forever.

A virus can destroy your digital photos or damage your system enough to prevent access to them - permanently. Expensive anti-virus software is never completely reliable and requires constant updates.

Storage devices like laptops, CDs and thumb drives are easily portable, but what makes them so convenient also makes them more vulnerable to loss, theft, and physical damage.