How to NOT Lose Someone's Wedding Photos
If you’re a photographer, either you’ve heard about the horror stories of someone losing their wedding photos, or it’s happened to you. I’ve heard from countless clients how they had a friend whose wedding photographer’s memory card failed and lost their photos, or their house burnt down and they lost their photos, or some other horrible technology fail that caused them to lose their photos. Yes, technology fails. It’s not always perfect. Is there a solution to making sure you have your booty covered 99.99% of the time? YES!!! You need multiple backups, and I’m going to walk you through exactly how I back up my images so these nightmares don’t ever happen to me.
The first thing you should be doing as a professional (ESPECIALLY if you are shooting weddings since this is a one time event!), is using a camera that writes onto two cards. You will need an SD card, and a Compact Flash Card. Shooting on two seperate cards is great because memory cards fail often, but the likelihood of both of them failing at the same time is obviously much smaller.
Next, as soon as you get home you need to import your photos and get started on your next backups. I don’t care how late it is, because freak accidents like robberies and kitchen fires happen and this will help protect you from that. I will write another blog post on my workflow and import/export process, but for now we are talking about backups, so let’s talk equipment. I use the Mercury Elite Pro Dual Mini. While this may seem expensive for an external hard drive, this one is amazing because it is a dual RAID hard drive, meaning it backs it up twice. Hard drives also fail on people, and this is an amazing, quality hard drive that will write your photos/data/everything twice, and it has 2.0TB on each drive so plenty of room to store all those thousands of RAWS! I promise you, this is an investment worth making to be sure you are keeping photos secure for your clients.
The final backup system I use is Backblaze. It’s a super affordable, cloud based backup system. Before I got this, I literally had nightmares about my house burning down and losing photos! I always told my husband, if our house started to burn down and I had to grab one item, it would be my hard drives, haha! Now, I can sleep peacefully knowing all of my photos and files are backed up online so if something were to happen, I would be covered (and I could grab my precious photo albums and keepsakes in a fire instead of hard drives hahaha).
I hope that helps!!
