You may have heard this countless of times from other photographers, and you’ll continue to hear it well into the future as well. It’s all for good reason because there’s no sense in investing so much time in your photography and photoshoot only to come back to your office and risk the results of your hard work go down the drain from an equipment failure. Always have a backup, like penguins always do.
It’s so important to keep backups of all of your files no matter how old or new they may be. Once you come back home from a photoshoot, what do you do? Do you leave them on your memory card collecting e-dust?
At the very least, you should transfer them on to another hard drive, which is being backed up on a daily basis.
My setup is not extensive by any means, and it can use improvements, but at least it is much better than how it was set up just a year ago.
My current backup solution
When I come home, I make it a habit to transfer all of the files from my memory card on to my desktop computer’s hard drive. I keep the files on my memory card until I run out of space, as another measure of precaution. My desktop computer is backed up constantly to an external hard drive using Apple’s Time Machine. This suffices for the time being. Once I finish editing the photoshoot, I transfer the original raw files and final files on to another external hard drive which is set up in a RAID format, outside of my office. This setup essentially mirrors all files on one hard drive to another one, allowing me to access those files no matter if one of the hard drives fail.
At this point I have three copies of my photoshoot stored on three different hard drives.
While this may be a good workflow for some people, it may also be insufficient for others. For one thing, I currently don’t have a backup of my files anywhere outside of my home, which means if something happens to my home, all three of those hard drives risk being affected.
Backing up to a cloud drive will take up an emmense amount of space, so many people opt to storing their RAID system outside of their physical work area for an added security measure.
Whatever your backup solution may be, whether it be a simple Time Machine backup or a more extensive setup, it’s a good thing to keep your files safe and secure on a separate device.
Wouldn’t now be a good time to see if your backup setup is sufficient for your needs?