Photo Backup Procedure

In the digital photography age there are tools to help you manage your workflow, to edit you photos, print your photos and do anything else you can imagine. But one thing most of these have missed is the ability to easily back up your photos, that is where we as photographers have to step in and help ourselves. This holds true if you are a pro on location or in studio or an amateur shooting for fun, you have to backup your images. Too many things to do with your computer and out of your control can happen to your images for you to leave it to chance.

Only you can design a perfect system for you and your workflow so I’m going to try to just explain my system to you and give you some other options for what may work for you.

My Current Workflow -

1. Import Memory Card into Lightroom. Lightroom is set up to copy the files to my attached external hard drive.
2. OSX is set up to watch the Images folder on my external drive. When it detects new images put into the folder it automatically makes a copy of them to a networked drive
3. I have Carbon Copy Cloner set up on my media server to run two daily scripts. The scripts make a two seperate copies of the images onto two more drives. This gives me 4 copies of each and every image I shoot within a day. I have plans to upgrade this process to also be an automated script so all my copies are within minutes.
4. Close Lightroom and my Lightroom catalog settings are set to force backups on exit. This file is backed up to my local hard drive. This means that I have two copies of the catalog both on the local disk and the external drive.

What’s still missing

I still don’t have an external back up in an off site location backup. This is due to a couple of things, first I’m lazy and I don’t want to have to transport a drive to and from a safe deposit box or some other location. The other option is to move them all to the cloud and have a internet copy, this is a great option and once Verizon FiOS and it’s 20-50 Mbps upload speed I may do this. Time Warner Cable on the other hand and it’s 386 kbps upload means it takes about 1 minute to upload each image to the cloud at the moment, shoot a thousand shots and see how long this really feels.

How are you backing up your pictures, am I missing anything else obvious?

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Tagged as: backups