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Digital photos are incredibly convenient. Instead of boxes and boxes of negatives and slides taking up storage space and being potentially damaged by humidity, age, fire, rodents, and just about a million other terrible fates, thousands of photos can now be stored in a tiny hard drive or even in that mysterious ether of the internet people refer to as “the cloud”.
Storage options abound, yet every single day countless numbers of digital photos are lost forever by photographers who failed to make backups. Much like insurance for a car or house, spending any money at all backing up photos can seem unnecessary…until they’re lost forever. To a photographer, there are few things more painful than losing thousands of treasured photos. There is a huge industry built around recovering lost data like photos from broken hard drives, but data loss is generally something that is easily preventable with a little bit of effort. Some photographers who do create backup copies of their photos put all their faith into one method, but most professional photographers agree that redundant backups in multiple places and using multiple methods isn’t paranoia…it’s just good practice.
Backup options include external hard drives, internal hard drives, cloud storage services like Dropbox or Google Drive, and optical storage mediums like CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs. While all of these methods can be reasonably reliable, none offers 100% security, which is why making multiple backups is always advisable. Whether your hard drive with your important photos on it is located in your home, office, or on a server rack 5,000 miles away, data loss is always a possibility. Most people know that hard drives will eventually fail, but even optical mediums like DVDs and CDs have a life expectancy and shouldn’t serve as the only backup method.
How often should you backup your photos?
As often as possible! Weekly backups should suffice for many casual photographers, while those who shoot huge amounts of photos during a single week should consider making daily backups. It’s not a question of if a hard drive will fail, but when.