Spring is here—a time for weddings, vacations, and other special events we like to capture with photographs. And now is a great time to make sure you have a plan in place to hold onto your valuable photos. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, more than half of people (52%) don't keep a backup of their digital files and photos, leaving them precariously susceptible to loss through accidental deletion, media corruption, and other digital disasters.

Don't become a statistic: follow these tips for peace of mind over the photo-taking season.

Transfer photos from the camera. Transfer photos from your camera to your PC or an external drive. Memory cards are sensitive to corruption caused by static electricity, so relocating those precious keepsakes to a safer place as soon as possible should be a top priority.

Have a backup plan in place. Backups should be a regular part of your computer maintenance. Make sure you keep copies of your files in a safe place, and keep to a regular backup schedule so that your copies are relatively current.

Stop immediately if a photo is deleted or missing. The moment you accidentally delete a digital photo (or otherwise discover it's mysteriously gone), stop! Do not take any more pictures or use the drive where the files were stored – as more data is written to the drive or memory card, the chances increase that the deleted data will be "stepped on" and overwritten.

Install a good file recovery tool now. Install a file recovery program like Search and Recover before you need it - having the program in place will increase your chances of successful recovery. This is because installing software writes information to the computer's drives; you can end up overwriting what you're trying to recover. If you've already experienced the loss, run the recovery software directly from the Search and Recover CD to avoid this risk over overwriting anything.

Don't panic even if you directly erase photos from your camera. If your photos are accidently deleted before you have a chance to transfer them to a computer, Search and Recover can still help - it's designed to retrieve files from any digital device, including all types of memory cards. Simply attach the device to the PC and it will show up as a drive; Search and Recover can then scan it and located lost data.