The importance of backing up your data

The image and photo backup process

How to fullfill the one function that is as important as taking good shots.

My photos are very precious to me. I keep everything I shoot, as long as it’s exposed and in vaguely in focus I’ve still got it. I’ve even still got my neg’s from college and I’ve got every digital shot I’ve taken in the last four years.

That being said three times since ‘The Switch’ to digital that I’ve had hard drives fail on me. Granted the amount I’ve abused them over the years I would expect a dud here or there but as a professional I can’t have this with my work. Out of everything I need my work station to be reliable and my photos to be there when I need them.

The first time I had a hard drive fail, I lost 300GB (that’s the equivalent of 15000 raw files from a modern DSLR) from a very well know hard drive manufacture and after that I swore I would never use them again. These days I have them on two drives locally to my work station (one internal one external) and also on my Flickr Pro account. The Flickr account is my failsafe, it has my final edits and I can access them anywhere in at anytime.
 
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lacie backup driveMy workstation has a working drive with everything important and current, then a network drive with a copy of my workstation and older archived files. It’s very easy to not think about it but it only needs to happen once for you to regret it, so these days I can’t recommend backing up enough. It doesn’t have to be fancy but it’s a very good idea to have some your important files elsewhere other than on your main drive.

The guys from Sandisk were in the other day and show off a new USB stick with built in back up however their main limitation is that they only go up to 32GB that’s fine if you just want your snaps and important documents backed up (which is Just as important) but for any photographer this is going to get filled up very quickly so look at the bigger drives, such as the LaCies. They go out to 8TB which is a hell of a lot of photos but you know that they will be very secure and the peace of mind that you will never lose your images is well worth every penny.

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