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Nothing strikes fear into the hearts of photographers, professional and amateur alike, like the thought of losing an entire archive of photos. Even though this is a nightmare scenario that every photographer wants to avoid, unfortunately many photographers continue to lose their photos when disaster strikes.
When it comes to data loss, disaster comes in many forms — of course, natural disaster is one of the more obvious culprits, but things like theft, accidental damage & loss, and hard drive and memory card failure and data corruption are all too common as well. It seems that hardly a week goes by without a news story highlighting the case of photographer whose work was stolen from their studio, car, or home. These stories are heartbreaking, but these instances of data loss are nearly always preventable.
If your entire photo library depends on the safety and reliability of just one piece of technology, your photos are in a very, very precarious spot, especially if you also rely on these images for your income. Likewise, even if you are diligent about creating multiple backups, if you store all these backups in the same location you’re still taking a huge risk. With a bit of foresight though, you can keep your photos fairly safe and steer clear of the awful stress that comes with agonizing over the loss of your images, and often the income that comes from your photography.
In this guide, we’ll take a brief look at how most photographers store their photos and then identify good redundant data backup habits that every photographer should practice.
Hard Disk Drives and Solid State Drives
While newer SSD (Solid State Drives) hard drives work in a similar way to flash memory cards and don’t have any moving parts, most hard drives on the market still store data magnetically on spinning disks referred to as platters. These platters spin at thousands of rotations each minute, and are susceptible to damage caused by magnetic fields, heat, and shock. A simple accident like knocking an external hard drive over while it’s spinning or writing data can cause sudden failure. Sometimes hard drive failure comes without warning and without any obvious cause.
A guideline for the cautious photographer to live by is that it’s not a question of if a hard drive will ever stop working properly, but rather a question of when this will happen. If all of your work is stored on a single hard drive, the unknown variable is just how long your hard drive will continue to operate properly. Will it be a month? A year? 5 years? Unfortunately, there’s usually no way to know.
Many photographers and videographers use a RAID configuration, which uses multiple hard drives in a redundant array, so that even if a single drive fails, the data will still be preserved. While using a RAID system can be a great part of a backup plan, it is not a complete backup plan itself. Relying on any one backup method that places all of your images and data in the same physical location doesn’t protect against many possible threats like theft, fire, and shock and doesn’t take into account the unlikely, but still possible fact that more than one drive can fail at the same time.
Hard Drives come in a few different formats and configurations:
Hard Disk Drives which make use of spinning platters can be found inside most current laptop and desktop computers and in external drive enclosures. These spinning hard disk drives come in two size configurations: 2.5″ drives and 3.5″ drives.
The smaller 2.5″ drives are typically found inside laptops and portable hard drives which plug into USB ports and don’t require additional power.
The larger 3.5″ drives are generally found inside of desktop computers and desktop external drives which do require a wall-outlet power connection.
Solid State Drives (SSD) have no moving parts and can be used in laptop computers, desktop computers, and external drive enclosures. The advantage of an SSD over a hard disk drive is that these Solid State Drives are silent, less susceptible to damage from shock, and typically offer much faster read and write speeds. The current disadvantage to an SSD is that it is significantly more expensive than a hard disk drive of the same capacity, but as the technology and manufacturing process matures and advances, the cost will naturally come down.
Hybrid Drives combine both a spinning hard disk drive and a smaller capacity Solid State Drive in a single drive. The benefit of this pairing is a lower cost than a pure Solid State Drive but quicker speed than a traditional hard disk drive, since the most commonly accessed files are cached by the SSD for quick access.
Memory Cards and USB Flash Drives
SD and CF cards and USB flash drives are all types of flash memory devices which store data even when they aren’t connected to power. These types of flash memory are pretty tough and there are plenty of anecdotal stories of memory cards surviving abuse like being accidentally washed or dropped in the dirt or water, but obviously your photos will be safer if you keep your memory cards out of harm’s way.
You can greatly decrease the risk of memory card data corruption by using only memory cards from highly rated brands like Lexar, SanDisk, Transcend, Sony, and others, although even with the very best professional level cards, data corruption and errors can always occur. Many photographers, especially those shooting events that can’t be reshot like weddings prefer to use cameras like the Nikon D810 and Canon 5DS which offer two card slots, allowing a redundant backup of your images to be created while you shoot, greatly reducing the risk of losing any important photos before additional backup copies are made.
To reduce your risk of corrupted image files, avoid doing things like using memory cards formatted for one camera in a different camera or yanking the memory card out of the camera or card reader while it’s still transferring data.
No-name memory cards may represent what looks like a huge bargain, but the few dollars you might save isn’t worth the potentially huge risk that these cards bring. Some ultra-cheap memory cards masquerade as high end cards — counterfeit memory cards are unfortunately an issue — you can avoid buying counterfeit memory cards by purchasing only from reputable retailers with a return policy and a guarantee that they stand behind.
Cloud Storage / Online Backup
The cloud is one of the tech world’s latest buzzwords, but essentially it entails uploading your photos or other data to a remote server or array of servers. Like a local RAID that we talked about before, data and images uploaded to a cloud storage provider are typically distributed across several locations in a redundant system with your information being placed in several hard drives in several locations, so that even if a single drive fails, your data will still be intact.
Even though many cloud storage providers may brand themselves as a one-stop-shop for backing up your important photos and files, cloud backup shouldn’t be your only method of data backup.
Online cloud backup companies come and go, and even though many of the larger companies with huge customer bases can generally be counted on to still be in operation a year from now, no backup service or method is infallible.
If you’re a prolific photographer with tens of thousands of RAW image files, you likely have hundreds of gigabytes and maybe even terabytes of data that you’d want to back up. A casual photographer with a small photo library might be able to complete their online backup in just a matter of hours or days, if you’ve got hundreds of gigabytes of data to upload this can potentially take weeks or even months to complete.
Every photographer should have an offsite backup of their images, and even though it’s not a perfect option in all regards, cloud backup services are well-worth looking into. Some providers offer unlimited backups, while others have more modest limits or require a more expensive plan to increase your storage capacity. Some of the most popular data storage providers include: CrashPlan, BackBlaze, Google Drive, and DropBox.
Optical disks like CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs are often used by photographers as a backup method, often for safekeeping a single session of photos.
CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays can certainly serve as part of a photography backup plan, but they shouldn’t be relied upon as the only backup method. With today’s huge image and video files being output by digital cameras, the relatively limited capacity of CD and DVD limits their usefulness as a backup method for some photographers, especially those capturing RAW images.
Blu-ray discs have much higher capacities that CD and DVD discs though, making them more suitable for digital photography and videography archival usage — single layer Blu-ray discs can store 25GB of data while double layer Blu-ray discs can store 50GB. For even higher capacity, triple layer Blu-ray discs can store 100GB of data.
Every photographer should make backing their images up in a timely manner a part of their work-flow. Amateur or professional, a backup plan is something you need to develop, to save yourself a mess of trouble down the road when data loss occurs.
Keeping no backups of your photography work is one of the worst mistakes a photographer can make. Keeping only one on-site backup is a marginal improvement over keeping no backup, but it’s still not much security against many threats. If you want to be able to enjoy your photos in 10 years, take these words to heart:
Never rely on a single method of backup
Every backup method has the potential for individual failure, but used together, your chances of preserving your photos for an entire lifetime and beyond is exceptionally good. It may sound like paranoia, but the more redundant backups you have of your photos stored in different physical locations, the more prepared you are.
We are all busy people, but no matter how busy you are, you should make keeping your backups up to date a priority. If you make an important edit to one of your images, be sure that you keep all of your backups updated. Data recovery is often possible when memory cards and hard drives fail, but it can take many hours and even days to recover lost images — having an updated backup ready to go cuts this wasted time out of the picture.
Stick to a Schedule
Give yourself a schedule to keep, and stick to it. If you only back your photos up every 4 or 5 months, you’re leaving lots of your work vulnerable. How often you back your work up is up to you, but the more frequently you make backups, the more of your work you will be able to recover in the event that your primary photo storage method fails.
Hedge your Bets
Download the photos from your memory card frequently and make additional backups of these photos as soon as possible. If you’re on a long trip, bring enough memory cards so that you don’t need to reuse the same card over and over — back your photos up as you go if possible to an external hard drive, but keep the photos on the memory cards until you return, just as an added backup method.
Don't Depend on Just One Backup Method
Don’t trust your photos to a single hard drive. Making duplicate copies of your photos across a few hard drives increases your protection against data loss. A RAID configuration can be a good part of a backup strategy, but it’s important to still keep a remote copy of your work in a separate location to protect against theft and natural disaster.
Make use of an Online Backup Service
Online backup services aren’t well suited to being the only backup method used by photographers, but they can be a great part of your strategy. Many of these services like Crashplan and Backblaze allow you to automate your backups, so that even while you’re away from your computer, your files will continue to upload to their servers. The initial backup time for a large archive of photos can be very long, but once you’ve gotten all of your old work backed up, new photos can be backed up as soon as you add them to your computer or drive.