Ultimate Guide: How Where & When to Back Up your Photos

Ultimate Guide – How Where & When to Back Up your Photos – use this guide to learn how to backup photos on a computer. Photo Storage is important.

I remember all of the scary stories from my photo classes in college – “I lost all of my images from a session!”, “An entire wedding…lost.” Laptops crashing, external hard drives freaking out, SD cards malfunctioning…horror stories for any photographer.

Nearly all of my teachers warned us to back-up all of our images on at least three platforms. And, they are absolutely right. It’s important to keep the images, not only for yourself, but for your clients.

There will be times when your clients lose the images you sent them or when they can’t find the correct link to access their galleries, and it’s crucial to be prepared for them. You’ll be perceived as reliable, which goes a long way in our industry!

How Where & When to Back Up your Photos

Whether you are backing up images from your DSLR camera or your phone photography – finding a system to back up your images is mandatory!

These are the platforms I use to back up my images, other than my laptop:

EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE

I use a 2 TB Seagate Hard drive to store duplicates of all of my sessions. The original files and the edited versions. It’s good to have two external hard drives for good measure.

Online Storage Service

Pixieset is the platform I use to send all of my clients their photo galleries, and it also serves as a back-up for the edited images. I keep the galleries live for years, and when I run out of space, I make sure they’re still backed up on my hard drives. You can also look into alternative galleries such as PASS or SmugMug.

Utilize a Cloud Platform (Google Drive, Drop Box, iCloud) or go Old School with Flash Drives.

Another great source for keeping your files backed up. If your hard drive crashed and you no longer had access to your galleries, you would still have this option! It may seem a little excessive, but sometimes it’s better to be safe than sorry.

You can also look into having multiple platforms of the same thing. For example, you can back up images on two separate hard drives.

Hopefully you’ll never need to use a backup platform, but these are good resources to have in case! And, believe me, your clients will love you for it!

The NY Times has a great read on setting a system for backing up your photos.