How do I backup my photographs
I get asked this question a lot by amateur photographers and while there is no definitive answer to everyones backup problems I’ll try and go through some of the best solutions that I have come up with since the introduction of digital photography.
Modern cameras with their high pixel count are now producing huge amounts of data and this needs to be stored on your PC. My Canon 5D mkII with its 21.1 mexapixels produces images that are over 20mb in size. This means that hard drives are being filled quicker than ever.
Thankfully storage has become increasingly less expensive over the last few years and you can now buy a 1 terabyte hard drive for just over £50. (I remember being taken on a school trip back in the 80s to county hall and we were told that they could store 5 gigabytes of information. We all turned to each other and said ‘what’s a gigabyte?’ I even went home and told my dad that they could store 5 kakabytes of data! Nowadays most mobile phones have more storage than this.)
The trouble is with all this storage we are now putting all our eggs in one basket and storing family photos, video, personal documents, etc. on our PCs. This means that we need a backup solution if we are to avoid losing everything in the event of a hard drive failure. Which happens far more often than people realise.
I’ll explain my setup and hopefully you will be able to adapt it to suit your own backup needs.
First of all, when myself and Karl photograph a wedding we can easily take over 2000 photographs between us. The first backup happens when the wedding party are sitting down to eat their meals. We carry a laptop with us and a card reader and dump all the memory cards to the hard drive and check to see that we’ve got everything that the bride and groom wanted.
Then we swap the memory cards for blank ones and put the full ones away in our camera bags. Once the speeches, first dance and evening do is over we get the laptop out again and repeat the process.
When I get back to the office from the shoot I immediately copy all the memory cards to the local hard drive of my PC which has tonnes of storage. When this is finished I then have a program on my PC that copies any new files to my ‘Drobo’ http://www.drobo.com/. This is an external storage device with 4 terabyte hard drives in it that automatically mirrors itself across all the drives to keep the data safe. It is in a different room to the PC and is in a locked firesafe that is bolted to the floor. You might not need the storage space of a Drobo but a cheap external hard drive would do just as well. Click the link for an example storage device Lacie
Next I have a program called Sugarsync on my pc https://www.sugarsync.com/ and this is an online storage solution that uploads all of the photographs to a database on the web. It is free for a 2Gb account and less than £4 a month for 30Gb which should be enough for most people.
At this stage I now have 5 copies of the photographs. The memory cards, PC, Drobo, laptop and web. This might seem like overkill but believe me, its better to spend a little more on storage than lose the wedding photographs from a bride and groom’s special day. Once I’m happy that the web sync has finished I might clear the laptop and memory cards for the next day’s shoot.
In: Photography News · Tagged with: kapow photography, Wedding Photography