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Are YOU Backing Up Enough? | How to Backup and Organize Your Photos and Videos
The thought of losing photos and videos, whether you’ve been paid to take them or not, is a daunting thought. Vanessa will show you her method for how to backup your photos and make sure they’re safe, accessible, and organized.
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46 comments
I need a user interface to see files if I’m using an external HS
-My workflow is in camera memory
-Then simultaneously Bluetooth transfer to backup iCloud drive
– after project, session, whatever… I pull files manually into laptop clearing the memory clean. The files will be saved on local c drive. So I have a hybrid raid …cloud, external drive, c drive, and then I data transfer all raw and dlog to customer . I’ll edit on my own and resend when done
I run 2 hard drives in my PC one for Windows and one for Linux always and keep my data on both and have DVD backups of stuff I don't want to loose.
In the event of a fire I could loose everything though which is a scary unsettling thought.
A while back my Windows hard drive failed all at once and become completely inaccessible. And then my 2nd one started giving warning shortly after I got Windows 10 installed on a new SSD two TB hard drive. So I scrambled to the store and grabbed up a 2nd 2 TB SSD for my Linux installs and copied the data over before the hard drive failed.
Just like that I was down to all my DATA being in one place and on a teetering hard drive.
Except for my DVD backups but they wouldn't be even close to up to date.
Wow, this Segway Portable PowerStation Cube Series sounds like an incredible backup power solution for outdoor enthusiasts like us! With its massive capacity, fast recharging, and waterproof technology, we can enjoy uninterrupted power during our camping trips. Plus, the smart app control feature is a nice touch. Thanks for sharing this recommendation!
Do you have a video of how to organize pictures from two different memory cards that will go into the same Catalog? Meaning if my wife and I have a photoshoot what we do is upload first pictures from one camera and then from the second camera, but what happens is they are not importing based on the time they were taken, once all of them are imported the pictures stay the order on how they got uploaded.
That intro is brilliant. My wife and I started laughing. we lost a batch two days ago haha
Vanessa, can you address what you do with the original RAW files on the Co-Pilot? Do you delete them once they are moved to your Big Dock? At what point do you re-format your cards, re-format (or erase) the Co-Pilot. I use a similar folder structure on my PC and after 4 years in business I have 3.87 TB of data which is slowing me down immensely. Since my PC is 10 years old anyway, I just bought an upgrade and I want to make sure I start over on the new drive the RIGHT way!
Very true I have lost photos in the past not a professional photo or anything but very good advice
Murphy's law is a b lol This helped me out.
Do you shoot with two cards? 1 for raw and 1 for jpeg?
There are two types of people: Those who have lost data, and those who are going to lose data — you can never have too many backups.
Very cool. I do a very similar process. I do wish that the portable drives would accept CFexpress cards because I have a feeling the new Canon R1 will have dual CFexpress cards and SD cards will soon fade away.
Glad to learn about the DJI Copilot, I never knew it existed and I'm using the Western Digital alternative (which also only has an SD card slot). The screen on the DJI makes it look like a better choice though.
I really enjoyed this video and was looking up the websites you use, I found smugmug and will be using that site as well, but what was the second site…it sounded like nview, but was not able to find it.
NEVER call RAID a backup. You should have a minimum of 2 local backups. I keep 3. If one fails your stuck with one. RAID fails… be it 5, 6, or 10 or whatever. RAID enclosures fail. Downloading 8TB of data after a drive failure from the cloud could take weeks depending on many factors. NEVER have less than 2 local copies RAID or not!
I use SSD drives to prevent movement damage. They are much tougher. I keep 3 copies of all RAW and JPG local so when (not if) one goes down I still have 2 copies while the drive is repaired. One stays in the fireproof safe. I have a cloud backup sync my local drives as well. I don't trust "the cloud" so I treat my local backups as the only copy but if a tornado takes my local I can download my cloud storage to start again.
Thanks. So do you just keep your RAW on the Lacie 2big Dock? Or do you offisite/backup for RAWs too?
Could not stress this enough, great advice. Looking lovely as always!
I don't shoot weddings or events and rarely shoot outside of my studio, so my backup scheme is much simpler. I shoot tethered, and my shoot session is in my Dropbox folder so as each photo is shot, it's on the card in the camera, on my laptop, and automatically uploaded to my Dropbox. At the end of the photo session, I also zip up the shoot session and upload it to an Amazon S3 bucket that I use for offsite storage. I also have a standard backup scheme to back up my laptop, and have a pair of external hard drives that I keep a copy of all shoots on and once a week cycle the drives between home and the studio so there's one at each location. I also use shootproof, so that's also a copy. At the end of the day, it's on two cloud storage services, my laptop, my laptop backup, and at least one external drive, and edited photos are also on shootproof.
personnaly, I found that, dual card slot in Backup config ( Raw + jpg fine on both card ). then copy on my laptop on site . on the laptop, the directory is configure with OneDrive and Synology Drive . so on the day of the shooting I have 5 copys, 3 differents places.
my synology have Snapshot activated so I can go back in case of cryptoware or deleting something it was not suppose to….
then synology get backup by Crashplan that automaticly copy everything … and keep different version…. single price , unlimited space.
on my end, take photo, copy photo on laptop… then everything is automatic and get copy and backup without me .
only down side… have to bring a laptop.. but macbook air… not really an issue….. the disk on it is a 2TB… so no need for external hard drive.
when I come home, from my imac, edit directly on my synology…. the photos are arleady there. save a lot of time
Thank you Vanessa for your professional advise, very first Merry Christmas for you and your family, you are fully right about the number of copies you save away. For a IT specialist the only real security backups are those off side because the idea this things will go wrong on your own premisses which will make you to lose your local copies. So your number of copies are fully justified and indeed LaScie backup systems are really fine tools , I also use their rugged system for transport. See you/hear you in 2021, until then stay safe and healthy.
Does harddisk (not SSD) is dangerous when close to a cell phone, magnet, etc?
Nice backup.
I just using Google Photo with unlimited. But know confuse because it will cease to exist in half next year. Because it free.
I have a few month reading smart of my internal HDD with hdde apps (search hdde in google). It really good if there there is Relocated sector count. It mean I need to buy a new hdd as fast as possible. The downsite of hdde is it not good for external hdd. I have a few HDD with that error but lucky me it all safe to new hdd.
Now I tried using external hdd to save my photo. My logic is if external hdd rare to put to usb, rare turn on, than the MBTF will be a lot slower and the hdd more ok for a long time.
I just have one backup, that is in Google Photo.
What we really need is an automatic tether HDD, connected to the USB port and automatically writing to disk when images are shot.
Great Video, Thank you, have a Great Christmas and New Year.
0:36 That's what I call a beautiful christmas present. 😉 Thank you very much. 🙂
Hey Vanessa, I love your content and you are an inspiration. I heard you mention an editor out of the country. Could you do an episode on your editing process, how you select editors and how you go about it. Thanks. Love your work. Hunter & Amanda from CALIFORNIA
Is the Co Pilot SSD or HD? I might have missed it.
Thanks.
thanks for the effort and the sharing. always helpful to see how others organize. do you employ a keyword system to locate an image? stay well. thumbs up.
don't want to lose photos shoot film
Wow, first time hearing about the DJI Copilot drive. Love their products. Thank ya!
Perfect! I’m an IT security consultant, and I rate your backups as being on point. Great advice, and thanks for sharing this 😃
Thanks and Merry Christmas to You and Your Family
yep,,, your right,,, iv'e had painful experiences in the past,,, computer hard drive broke,,, lost all my best work,,,that was about 20 years ago,,, still havent got over it,,, but I learnt my lesson,,, I hope all the subscribers take note,,, copy copy copy,,, after all you cant have enough of a good thing.
Thanks! Nice tips..
What is the Web site you use for your clients, EnView, NView? Having issues trying to find!
This is not a 3-2-1 backup solution Vanessa. If this is genuinely what you are doing, your data is not properly backed up and is vulnerable. Out of the things you claimed were back-up, most of them were not.
A 3-2-1 back-up scheme works like this. three (3) copies of your data, two (2) of which are local on DIFFERENT TYPES OF MEDIA, one (1) of which is stored offsite.
A RAID array is NOT back-up. RAID is redundant data. It's designed to ensure your files on a primary source aren't lost in the event of a common drive failure by using math not parity. Even in RAID 1 it isn't making exact 1:1 copies of your data, RAID uses math. Your RAID array should be considered one (1) copy of your data in total.
If you are storing one copy of your data on a RAID array locally, a second copy needs to be stored on a different type of media. That is, not a hard drive. Tape is still a widely used back-up medium, but if you can't afford the buy in yet optical media (CD/DVD/Bluray) should be your go to for your second copy. Never use unpowered NAND (flash drives, SD/CF cards, unpowered ssd, etc) for backup. Due to the nature of how NAND works, it very likely won't be available for recovery when you need it.
For the purpose of 3-2-1, Cloud storage is NEVER considered a back-up solution. Cloud storage providers can go out of business, they can get hacked, lose or corrupt your data, hold your data hostage for a fee or limit your ability to recover by way of amount of data retrievable or the speed of download. Just because your current cloud provider hasn't had any of those things happen so far, doesn't mean they can't (or won't) in the future. Back-up is all about planning for the worst future.
This doesn't mean you can't also store your data in the cloud, it just shouldn't be considered part of your 3-2-1 scheme. Offsite data for your 3-2-1 scheme should ALWAYS remain in your control. Your best bet is to use a friend or family members house, or an office owned by your work in another city (another state is better). The reason we choose another city or state, is because inside the same city they will likely be effected by the same natural disaster your need your offsite back-up to recover from. For offsite backup, choose an unpowered hard drive, tape, optical media (CD/DVD/Bluray) or a powered small NAS.
Hard drives, tapes and optical media require you to physically send them back and forth between the sites which means you will likely back-up less frequently. Synology and QNAP both have proprietary sync functions on their NAS enclosures, which allows you to link two (or more) from the same brand together over the internet. Buying two and sending one to your chosen offsite backup location is the gold standard. The benefit here is that the NAS enclosure automatically syncs your back-up to the offsite location, while providing you with a local RAID array. In the event of a disaster you just need to buy a new NAS enclosure and sync it to your offsite to get everything back, and you know you're have the most recent version of everything.
A solid 3-2-1 back-up plan might for example involve 2 synology NAS enclosures, one of which is at a relatives house in another state, and a DVD drive where you are in the routine of burning a copy of your latest files whenever you dump them from your camera. You can even set this up to happen automatically.
A good back-up routine needs to also include data recovery testing. This is a process whereby you are testing to make sure all of your archived data is still accessible and should be performed at least once every 3 months. Getting this stuff right is important.
Yes…backup isn't sexy but it is super important. I've only ever had one card go bad but it was when all cameras were a single card. And I had a whole iMac go down due to a power surge and not having a surge protector or a uninterruptible power supply. I did manage to claw some files back that time just not all of them.
I use a RAID drive to back up everything and then Livedrive's online backup in addition gives me peace of mind. It is unlimited and once it's all in the cloud it quickly updates. It's so important to keep files safe. They can so easily be lost!
She rocks!
RAID is NOT Backup. Just saying
Love this video. Question, are both the storage drives you mentioned hard disk drives, solid state drive or is the portable one ssd and the raid backup hdd?
Curious about durability and longevity.
I used to be the worst backer upper of all time
I’m going to Botswana in November and this looks like a great option to bring to back up my cards. I really don’t want to bring my laptop if I don’t have to.
Something almost all of these videos overlook is recovery. No matter how you back up, if you do not test being able to recover files, you DO NOT have a reliable backup system. (@VJ – getting files back from your editor is considered a closed loop system and is just as good as testing.)
What I do is randomly choose a folder and a file, rename that file (don't delete it) and try to get it back from the backup. Now imagine doing that for thousands of files in hundreds of folders.
You may discover that recovering from a disaster would be a nightmare, even if the backup works perfectly.
Very good!! In the edit you mentioned the backup of the raw files to another site. That's important, because in IT they say: raid is not a backup 🙂 Having a raid systems means redundancy in disks, but if files get corrupted or anything else goes wrong, raid means it's just redundantly wrong 🙂 So always backup the raid drives for a real backup. And do not use raid5, because there is an error in that system. Raid1 like in this example is better. Even better would be a self healing filesystem like ZFS or btrfs. Good video!
I don't even do event photography, but I'm a stickler for backup. Dual cards, import to lightroom (using an external drive), copy to second drive, cloud backup service which continuously watches my main drives for new files.
Thank you for the video! I have a question, you spoke of a program that you share your images with clients as a format for them to choose images for purchase. Was that "INVIEW"? Please link that for me. I have been looking for a better way to let clients view/choose images for purchase after a session. Thank you!
Very helpful! Thanks. I appreciate all the Adorama videos and learn from the every week.
🤗 Pro