Back when a first left the corporate world and when into photography I had no idea why I needed to backup my image files. I mean, why? They’re here protected on my hard drive, I’ve never had one fail and I really didn’t have the money to sink into a fancy RAID backup system. I stuck with what I was doing to went on about my business.
I wasn’t until I heard Becker say that if you we’re a professional wedding photographer that it was unacceptable to lose someone images from their wedding. And he was 100% correct. It is unacceptable. I mean these photos and photos in general are priceless. That’s why I’m such a fanatic about backing up many times to all sorts of media. I’d like to go through the process I use to backup all of my photos (and some video) to make sure nothing will happen to them.
First of all, I don’t really have a fancy system and it doesn’t take much money to accomplish this for yourself. After I’ve downloaded my cards onto the main Apple drive, I backup all (and I mean ALL) the files, even the ones I know will be trashed later, to my primary backup hard drive which is a Western Digital Green Drive internal drive placed into a MacAlly Aluminum Drive Enclosure. Everything goes onto the primary backup drive and then I clone the primary drive to another Western Digital Green Drive as my secondary backup. So now I’ve got two backups, safe and sound.
Some might say, well that’s enough, right? WRONG!
I take it even further than the two hard drive backups. After I’ve had a chance to go through the images and pick the ones I want to keep and the ones I want to delete and make my Level 2 adjustments, I then write my adjustment data to the image via XMP data and burn the originals RAW+XMP files to one or more DVD’s. The freshly burned DVD’s go into off-site storage, which is usually at my parents or grandparents house.
So now I had three backups. Whew, that’s a lot of work. Not really, the computer does all the work and come on these are priceless photos of your clients and your personal photos. Protect them!!
For a while there, I sufficed that that was enough. Until I realized it wasn’t. Yes, I am a backup freak. But it’s important. I needed one more reliable source. One that would protect them images no matter what. That solution was online backup. Sending all of my file to the web. I quickly realized that the “cloud” was the way to go. Highly advanced and redundant backup and hosting solutions were out there but who do you choose.
I immediately thought about SmugMug. SmugMug is a photo and video hosting company that allows you to host your photos and videos for the world to see and even buy. Their galleries and endless customization options looked oh so nice. But I wasn’t completely sold until I found out that SmugMug didn’t compress and resize my images like most other service. Also, their storage capacity was unlimited, even their basic plan. Also, their plans are cheap, only $39.95 per year for unlimited storage. That’s only $0.01 per day.
I immediately signed up for they’re Professional Plan, which allowed me to host HD video and sell if I wanted. I organized my structure within their system and began uploaded massive amounts of images to them. Usually one wedding took about 8 hours and put a tremendous strain on my connection, so I reverted to letting them upload at night. I took me nearly 2 months of uploading every night to get all of my wedding, bridal, and engagement photos to SmugMug. Lately I realized that I still had unlimited space with SmugMug and began to backup all of my personal photos with them. Why not?
So that’s my backup startegy. 4 full backups – 2 local, 1 off-site and 1 in the cloud. Your photos are safe! I can now rest.
SmugMug has been so much fun to work with. Not only do I use them as my online backup solution, but they also feed the website galleries. Those pretty galleries you see at lawrencekent.com and actually being produced and fed my SmugMug. The Show It Fast and SmugMug teams have integrated their systems so the Show It Sites galleries are driven by SmugMug galleries. How cool is that?
So here’s my plea to you. Whether you’re a professional wedding photographer or just a avid photo taker, protect your photos. AT ALL COSTS.
Get a backup drive, burn them to CD or DVD’s, backup to SmugMug or a like service, but back them up. You’ll thank me later when a hard drive fails or you accidentally delete them. If you want to use SmugMug as a solution, you can get $5 off by entering my e-mail address, kent@lawrencekent.com, when signing up.
It’s so simple, but very important. Too many things are going completely digital and we all want to protect our priceless memories.
Cheers
