Tis the season to….Back Up Your Digital Image Files

This is the first post on my new blog that deals with the more technical issues of photography and digital files.

It doesn’t have anything to do with taking pictures but it is about saving them!

Tis the season for taking holiday pictures, family pictures and getting new phones and cameras as gifts. I really want you to have these great and precious images that you are taking available for you to look at in the coming months and years.

Not long ago , a friend told me that she was getting ready to go on a holiday cruise and she still has all of her images from her big European vacation on the card in her camera! I have another friend (who is a former professional photographer) who recently lost about two years worth of images because she dropped the hard drive they were on and they had not been backed up anywhere else. Another lost every image she had taken of her family over about a five-year period because of a failed hard drive. And there is the architect I know who lost a years worth of work because someone broke into his office and stole all of his computer equipment including his backup drives that were in a closet.

Please get your pictures off of the memory card in your camera, phone, camera bag, or plastic bag in your desk drawer and onto your computer’s hard drive and then back them up. Once, twice, three times….. Today.

Cameras get lost, they get stolen, they get damaged. Hard drives fail, get dropped and stolen. Flash cards and memory sticks get lost, damaged and corrupted.

I highly recommend that you follow the 3-2-2 method for the most secure storage of your images and other precious data.

• At least three copies of each file
• At least two different media types
• At least two different physical locations

I make sure that all of my images are copied to three different hard drives before I reformat my memory cards. Then burn them to a CD, DVD or BluRay disk. One of my hard drives lives at my house while the rest stay at my studio. Hard drives are amazingly inexpensive today.  I saw a 4 TB drive for less than $200 today!

As far as locations, if you don’t have a secondary location such as an office or outside work place, perhaps you can arrange with a friend to store each others drives.

There are some “cloud” backup services available and that may be a solution to those of you who don’t take a lot of images. If you decide to use one of these services as one of your back up types, be sure to check on how long it will take to upload and, more importantly to some, recover you images should you need them. I currently have 20 plus terabytes of digital images on hard drives and that is simply too much data for reasonable cloud storage, although I will be looking into that for some select, high value images in the coming months.

I know some of you may feel it is too much work or not worth it, but think of what you might miss if your house burned down, or someone broke in and stole all of your computer equipment and camera equipment, or even if just your laptop or camera was stolen, lost or damaged. Back up your images today! Even if it is simply getting your pictures off of your phone and memory cards and onto another medium.

I am going to start giving out periodic tips, tricks and advice for using your camera and taking better pictures and would really like to know what my readers are interested in learning about. Please subscribe to my blog and leave comments or email me about what you would like to see me write about.

I am a commercial, adverting, editorial photographer located in Beaufort, SC but also work in Savannah, GA and Charleston, SC.