Always backup your images

As a wedding photographer, securely backing up your images is absolutely vital as the implications of losing images doesn’t even bear thinking about!  In this post Kris Pendlebury, a fantastic Liverpool based wedding photographer, kindly explains how he backs up his images following a wedding.  Once you have read his post please take a look at Kris’ stunning images on his website at http://kjpimages.co.uk/

Always back up your images!

An essential part of photography, more so for weddings due to the irreplaceable value of images is to ensure you have backup copies of all your work. From the initial copies of the RAW files (Shoot RAW) to any edited work further down the line. There are many different options and media solutions for backing up images but here’s how I do it and what works for me…

On return from the wedding, copy all images from the cards to the work PC then copy all the images from the work PC to two external backup drives. For external backup drives I have chosen to use 1TB internal drives via a drive caddy as quite an inexpensive storage solution. The drives are stored in HDD protection cases. One drive is kept onsite for quick access to the files and the other is stored offsite for safekeeping. I regularly update the backups to ensure the edited images are also backed-up. Once I have finished work on a wedding including album design, I remove the files from the work PC to free up space, thus only using drive space on this PC for work in progress.

This leaves me with two full copies of all RAW and edited images, one onsite and one offsite. In addition most of my packages include the supply of Hi-Res edited images to the client, this reduces the chance of me and the client needing access to the backup images in the future.

I have looked at also backing up images online using something like Backblaze but large image files and slow upload speeds make it impractical for now. Hopefully the future will bring more secure and efficient ways of backing up images.