Six Tips To Keep Your Photos Safe
Storing your photos and making sure they’re safe is always an important consideration for any photographer, especially for professional photographers who have clients to deliver to and simply cannot afford losing their images. Unfortunately, backup solutions can be expensive, difficult to use and often, simply overlooked. With the increasing file sizes from cameras such as the Nikon D810 and the upcoming Canon 5DS, storage has been more important than ever before.
Then, of course, there are always those large companies trying to sell photographers expensive backup equipment and play on the fears of losing images. The most expensive solutions aren’t always the best and often, they’re well beyond the means of most people, myself included. If you know how to spend your money well and are willing to put in a little work, you can get your data backed up and safe for much less cost!
In this article, I’ll be going over my six tips to make sure you get all your photos backed up and safe without breaking the bank and buying expensive new hardware.
1) Never Keep all Eggs in the One Basket
If you have multiple drives, as most desktop computers these days are (for example, I have two 2TB Western Digital Green drives), then never keep all your work on the one drive. Personally, I always keep all my original out-of-the-camera files on one drive and then my finished products (edited, exported and ready to deliver) images on another drive.
This way, if one drive fails, then I would only either lose my original images, or my finished images – I won’t lose both. Of course, ideally I wouldn’t want to lose either, but both is much better than losing everything, right?
2) Remember the Humble External Hard Drive
I always recommend portable 2.5” USB External Hard Drives as great backup solutions. Personally, I use Western Digital 1TB Passport Drives, which are available on Amazon. Even if you’re getting 80MB RAW files from your D810, you’ll be able to store 12,500 images per drive, which is plenty.
Portable hard drives are great, compared to their desktop alternatives, because you can take them with you. This is important, if you can’t afford offsite backup, always take your backups with you so at least if your house floods or burns down whilst you’re away, you have your images. I always pop my drive in my pocket or bag as I’m heading out of the house, with my phone, wallet and keys – you’ll eventually get used to it.
To get my files onto my external drive, I use a nifty little program called SyncToy, which I simply set to mirror my Lightroom directory to the external drive. It works great and has always been reliable. Considering how cheap these drives are, it’s worth getting two, so that you can store your original files on one and finished files on the other (relates back to the first point).
3) Cull Your Images
Most of us shoot way more than we actually want to keep. I never advocate deleting “bad shots” because sometimes we’ll come back to a bad shot later on and actually really like it, I know I have, but when you are backing up, don’t back up your test shots, the shots you redid because you messed up the exposure or focus, meaningless shots which you took just to test your lenses work…etc.
The important question I would ask myself is whether losing a certain image would mean much to me. I wouldn’t really care if I lost test shots or the experimental shots of a random object on my desk I made when trying to learn about off-camera flash. If you don’t really mind losing them, then don’t back them up – backing up unneeded files not only wastes space and money, but also degrades your backups long term because more read/write cycles are bad for your hard drives.
4) Always Test Run your Drives before Use
This is important, hard drives follow a bathtub curve for failure rates, this means that there tends to be lots of failures (from mechanical defects) at the start of their lives, which decreases and levels off for a while until they reach the end of their lives, when failure rates start to increase.
This means that you don’t want to give backup duties to a newly bought hard drive. I always use my newly bought hard drives for a while storing stuff such as movies and music for several weeks before trusting it to store my important backups. This is great because if the hard drive fails within those few weeks, then you know you got a bad drive and can get it replaced.
5) Always Keep More than One Copy
I always like to keep more than one copy of images at all times. This means that as soon as an SD card is filled, I’ll import it straight away, then I don’t format that SD card until I’ve already gotten a backup of my pictures. This is so that in case one medium fails, there’s always another.
Some people even take this to the next level and make a third backup of their most important images, e.g. their commercial ones or their best images. This is because as we increase the number of backups, we exponentially decrease the rate of failure, meaning we can be pretty safe with even three backups.
For example, if the failure rate is 10% per year (which it isn’t, but I’m choosing an extraordinarily high to demonstrate the point), having no backups means you have a 10% chance of a total loss. Having one backup reduces that to 1% and having two backups reduces it to 0.1%. Extraordinary.
6) Make Friends and Offsite Backups
Photographers make great friends! I’m sure you all already know that, but it always pays off to have a good photographer friend you can trust to exchange images with. Offsite backup is always great, because you can make sure that your images are always safe if your system goes down and both sides win, because you also have a copy of your friends’ images in case they go down too.
If you can’t because of the nature of work you do, or because you simply can’t find anyone, guys like Backblaze and Crashplan do great offsite backups over the Cloud for great prices. I wouldn’t use them as my only backup solution, but to add to an already strong backup solution, they are great value for money to add another layer of security.
Then, of course, there are always those large companies trying to sell photographers expensive backup equipment and play on the fears of losing images. The most expensive solutions aren’t always the best and often, they’re well beyond the means of most people, myself included. If you know how to spend your money well and are willing to put in a little work, you can get your data backed up and safe for much less cost!
In this article, I’ll be going over my six tips to make sure you get all your photos backed up and safe without breaking the bank and buying expensive new hardware.
1) Never Keep all Eggs in the One Basket
If you have multiple drives, as most desktop computers these days are (for example, I have two 2TB Western Digital Green drives), then never keep all your work on the one drive. Personally, I always keep all my original out-of-the-camera files on one drive and then my finished products (edited, exported and ready to deliver) images on another drive.
This way, if one drive fails, then I would only either lose my original images, or my finished images – I won’t lose both. Of course, ideally I wouldn’t want to lose either, but both is much better than losing everything, right?
2) Remember the Humble External Hard Drive
I always recommend portable 2.5” USB External Hard Drives as great backup solutions. Personally, I use Western Digital 1TB Passport Drives, which are available on Amazon. Even if you’re getting 80MB RAW files from your D810, you’ll be able to store 12,500 images per drive, which is plenty.
Portable hard drives are great, compared to their desktop alternatives, because you can take them with you. This is important, if you can’t afford offsite backup, always take your backups with you so at least if your house floods or burns down whilst you’re away, you have your images. I always pop my drive in my pocket or bag as I’m heading out of the house, with my phone, wallet and keys – you’ll eventually get used to it.
To get my files onto my external drive, I use a nifty little program called SyncToy, which I simply set to mirror my Lightroom directory to the external drive. It works great and has always been reliable. Considering how cheap these drives are, it’s worth getting two, so that you can store your original files on one and finished files on the other (relates back to the first point).
3) Cull Your Images
Most of us shoot way more than we actually want to keep. I never advocate deleting “bad shots” because sometimes we’ll come back to a bad shot later on and actually really like it, I know I have, but when you are backing up, don’t back up your test shots, the shots you redid because you messed up the exposure or focus, meaningless shots which you took just to test your lenses work…etc.
The important question I would ask myself is whether losing a certain image would mean much to me. I wouldn’t really care if I lost test shots or the experimental shots of a random object on my desk I made when trying to learn about off-camera flash. If you don’t really mind losing them, then don’t back them up – backing up unneeded files not only wastes space and money, but also degrades your backups long term because more read/write cycles are bad for your hard drives.
4) Always Test Run your Drives before Use
This is important, hard drives follow a bathtub curve for failure rates, this means that there tends to be lots of failures (from mechanical defects) at the start of their lives, which decreases and levels off for a while until they reach the end of their lives, when failure rates start to increase.
This means that you don’t want to give backup duties to a newly bought hard drive. I always use my newly bought hard drives for a while storing stuff such as movies and music for several weeks before trusting it to store my important backups. This is great because if the hard drive fails within those few weeks, then you know you got a bad drive and can get it replaced.
5) Always Keep More than One Copy
I always like to keep more than one copy of images at all times. This means that as soon as an SD card is filled, I’ll import it straight away, then I don’t format that SD card until I’ve already gotten a backup of my pictures. This is so that in case one medium fails, there’s always another.
Some people even take this to the next level and make a third backup of their most important images, e.g. their commercial ones or their best images. This is because as we increase the number of backups, we exponentially decrease the rate of failure, meaning we can be pretty safe with even three backups.
For example, if the failure rate is 10% per year (which it isn’t, but I’m choosing an extraordinarily high to demonstrate the point), having no backups means you have a 10% chance of a total loss. Having one backup reduces that to 1% and having two backups reduces it to 0.1%. Extraordinary.
6) Make Friends and Offsite Backups
Photographers make great friends! I’m sure you all already know that, but it always pays off to have a good photographer friend you can trust to exchange images with. Offsite backup is always great, because you can make sure that your images are always safe if your system goes down and both sides win, because you also have a copy of your friends’ images in case they go down too.
If you can’t because of the nature of work you do, or because you simply can’t find anyone, guys like Backblaze and Crashplan do great offsite backups over the Cloud for great prices. I wouldn’t use them as my only backup solution, but to add to an already strong backup solution, they are great value for money to add another layer of security.