I’ve had conversations with photographer friends from time to time about the strategies they use to back up their files. In those conversations, we discuss camera cards, computers, hard drives and both connected and remote offsite storage. More on that in a bit.
But as we all know, computers are not the only way we capture our photographs now. In this age of mobile devices, many of us take pictures on our cellphones equally often and keep all of those images on our cellphones only. I discovered this when talking to customers in the camera store who come in looking to print their cellphone images for friends and family. Many don’t have data plans, so backup of these images is not generally something they consider and they are genuinely surprised when I casually ask.
Some cellphone operators provide an unlimited pseudo-storage service where a thumbnail sized version of the original image on the phone is always accessible in the cloud. These take up virtually no space but also can’t be downloaded and printed to share or put up on a wall. Great for social media only. If the phone dies or is somehow corrupted, the original images are gone forever.
To complicate this further, many of us now include video in our collections, again on the phone or through any of many other recording devices. Video has become a major element in my media collection now so it too requires some type of backup solution.
Over the course of the last couple of years, I’ve considered all of the sources of my media and have come up with options that I feel comfortable with. Likely overkill for most, but might be worth a read…
Continue reading “Backing Up is Hard to Do”
Travelling on assignment or for personal interest is typically a big part of most photographer’s lives. The challenge of managing gear – taking enough, but not too much – is always top of mind. But what about managing your images while you are on the road?
Although I use cloud storage as my primary storage option, most of these services “sync” at least some of that content to a local hard drive. Until today, that hard drive was my computer hard drive. But I’ve now run out of room on the local drive, and had to make a choice about where to put the local copies. Here’s what I came up with. 
The start of a new year. Time to consider shaping up – not only personally but maybe for your photography workflow. How can you do things better? At the very least, you’ve probably accumulated a huge amout of content this year. Are you running out of storage space? And are you safeguarding your work appropriately?
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