NEVER Lose Your Images with This Backup System

my worst nightmare and probably your worst nightmare is losing the images from a shoot i couldn't imagine having shot a magazine spread or album cover company headshots or a wedding only to lose the entire shoot to a hard drive failure theft or even a fire the most valuable assets in our business are not our cameras our lenses our lighting systems those are the most expensive but they're not the most valuable the most valuable things in our business are our images and we need to protect them at all costs i'm going to show you how to set up a system with multiple layers of redundancy without having to spend thousands of dollars [Music] hey everybody i'm kpr and this is studiobuilder where i help photographers develop the skills they need to create amazing images and run a professional photography business today i'm going to show you how to create and implement a great backup system without having to spend thousands of dollars on raid drives and network attached storage systems it's very likely that you've had a hard drive fail on you i've had multiple drives over the past couple of decades fail and it sucks luckily a lot of that happened before i started backing everything up in multiple places now that's not to say i haven't lost files i have i think most of us have that was due to my own mistakes in the way i had things set up but i was able to recover some of those files but not everything i lost some stuff data recovery is crazy expensive if you need to go down that route so the best thing to do is to set ourselves up for never having to use a data recovery service so with that in mind i'm going to come right out and say that the absolute absolute bare minimum of a backup system that you should have in place is an online solution something like backblaze that is constantly backing up your files online and off site personally i use backblaze because i can tell it which drives to backup and have it set to continuous backup so my files are always always always being backed up it's only 60 a year i use 110 for two years plan and i'll include a link in the description below so you can get a free one full disclosure if you do subscribe to backblaze i will also get a free month it's win-win for both of us the absolute bare minimum is an online off-site solution before we go any further we need to take a quick look at the life cycle of our images the way i look at digital asset management is that our files go through three different stages in their lifecycle there are live files working files and archive files live files are when they're being created during a shoot and they're still in your camera they're on your sd card or you're tethering to a computer those files are live they're living they're they're being worked on and created in that moment then we have working files these are the files that you are currently working on they are not in your camera and they're not yet delivered or archived and then there are archive files archive files are files that you are done with they've been delivered to your client you're not likely to touch them again so let's start with live files it's not often that sd cards get corrupted when they do it's typically due to bad card management format your cards in the camera before every shoot if you cannot afford a camera body that has dual slots don't get discouraged most of us start there and some people are still there if you're using a dual card camera body don't swap out the cards at the same time swap them out in overlapping intervals when you take one card out you're still writing to another this gives you overlap in case there's a corruption in your card this creates an offset of images in case something happens to both cards there is an incredibly incredibly low chance of that happening but why take the risk when the shoot is finished make sure the cards leave the set with two different people in different vehicles and go to different destinations i understand this is not always possible i often shoot by myself so it's hardly ever possible for me and then don't delete or reformat the card until the images exist in at least three different locations if you have a single card slot in your camera body like if you oh one set like i do here on the canon 6d this was my primary camera for a long time single card slot there's a card in there just one card slot i have gone through most of my career using a single card slot this is the canon 6d this uh before this i used the 60d which is back there and then 6d and now i'm on an r6 if you're shooting weddings i highly recommend two card slots it is not an absolute necessity if you can rent a camera or borrow a camera that has two card slots in it just minimize your risk this this video is all about minimizing your risk of losing your images so if you do have only a single card slot in your camera body you need an alternate working solution my recommendation is to use multiple cards and swap them out often that way if if a card fails if if a card fails or gets ruined or lost you will only lose a small portion of the shoot not the entire job losing half an hour of a wedding is horrible but it's a lot less worse than losing 8 or 10 hours of a wedding change your cards frequently if you can back up your sd cards on site do that if not at least you've minimized the risk by spreading your shoot across multiple cards so if you're shooting a wedding with a single slot camera which i have done you could borrow a camera or rent a camera just make sure that you account for that expense in your pricing i recognize that i might be in a bit of a privileged position and not all people will have access to that if you can't do either of those if you can't rent or borrow a camera just make sure that you and your second shooter are never swapping out cards at the same time so you'll never lose coverage if you don't have a second shooter maybe you live in a place where there aren't a lot of photographers get a good card holder and multiple cards and the last thing is lock your cards when you're done with a shoot just slide this little piece here down and lock it boom then you can't accidentally format that card develop a process develop a system to protect your images for your working files you want to create a system of redundant storage now you can do this in multiple ways but here's how i do it it's the system that i recommend to everyone when i discuss backing up your work there are two parts to this real-time online file syncing and offline file syncing so the first part that this is real-time online file syncing and i use google drive for this and i actually just upgraded my internet connection here to a one gigabit per second download and 30 megabit per second upload i have two terabytes of online storage through google drive and a one terabyte internal drive that drive is dedicated to syncing my google drive account everything that's on that drive is backed up and synced to google drive in real time i have a folder on that drive for my working files and that holds about six months worth of sessions in a regular year if i make adjustments to my capture one session it's backed up if you're on a mac you may not have two terabytes of storage but just make sure that you're using a real-time online backup solution like google drive or dropbox and dedicate some space in that drive folder for your working files the next step is nightly local backups in my tower i also have a large 12 terabyte internal drive i have nightly backup scheduled for that drive in case my working drive fails even though my working drive is connected to google drive and is being backed up constantly i use a seagate 12 terabyte barracuda drive for this every shoot i've ever done is on that one internal drive in my desktop computer tower so i can access any shoot without digging through one of my many external hard drives at this stage my working files currently exist in four places on the sd cards on the working hard drive online in my google drive account and on a second hard drive inside the desktop computer now i bought that 12 terabyte internal drive when i was considering getting a nas raid system nas nas stands for network attached storage and raid stands for redundant array of independent disks i had my eye on the synology 918 plus four bay enclosure nas i realized it was just starting to get too expensive with the cost of the enclosure and then putting four large drives inside the nas system a raid system allows for a redundancy of files so that if one of the drives fails or dies you don't lose everything you don't lose anything and you just need to drop in a new drive to replace the old one and the whole system will repair itself and back itself up the real advantage is that all of your files are in one place and they're safe from pretty much everything except fire and theft so instead of dropping two to three thousand dollars on a raid system i decided to go with the 12 terabyte seagate drive which cost me just a little over 400 now the advantage it gives me is being able to store all my images in one place but it also allows me an extra step of redundancy to my digital asset management basically exactly what a nas system is designed to do the advantage of the internal drive is that it's actually faster than an as system it's attached directly to the motherboard of my computer so it's nice and quick now if you're on a mac you don't really have the option of adding internal drives you could opt for a nas system or get an external drive enclosure that connects through usb do your homework first to make sure that it plays well with your mac i have friends with max who even just this western digital my passport drive they have a very difficult time getting the mac to read the drive which is ridiculous so that brings us to archive files the files on that 12 terabyte internal archive are backed up in two places offline on external usb hard drives that i have connected to my computer these drives in my hand are from previous years of photos the drive currently connected to my computer is 2019 through 2021 i have just i just have absolutely a bunch of these and they go into cold storage here in this drawer and then also online through back blaze and amazon photos so let's get into long-term offline storage before i bought the 12 terabyte internal drive i used to keep all of my archives on external western digital passport drives now these drives act as cold storage for my archives and they sit in a drawer over here in case the external drive ever fails right now i only have one external drive attached to my computer for photos and i back it up manually when i migrate shoots from the working drive to the archive since i know everything in my archive is also backed up online in two separate places the external drive attached to my computer is also backed up to backblaze at this point i've lost count of how many places my photos are backed up so let's talk long-term online storage as i mentioned earlier back blaze is only 60 a year for a personal account and it comes with unlimited storage it's amazing and it should be the primary method for which you store your archive and then finally the secret sauce in my whole system amazon prime every amazon prime account comes with an unlimited photo storage that includes jpegs tip files psds even raw files all of that is included unlimited with your amazon prime account so not only do you get free next day delivery from amazon amazon prime tv and movies you get unlimited online digital storage of all your images so if money is tight and you're just starting out get backblaze then maybe get an amazon prime account download backblaze right now put it on your computer and start the backup process right away it'll work in the background keeping your files safe your initial upload is going to take a long time but once that's done you'll feel so much better so look with storage being so cheap right now in your external archive being unlimited in size there's no reason to delete old shoots or even unedited files this is a practice i've never understood i can't even count the times i've gone back into an old photo shoot and realized that i had much better photos in there than i had previously processed i've grown i'm a better photographer now i'm not caught up on technical perfection and i see things differently in older photos that i didn't see before my eyes and my artistic vision have evolved and mature don't eliminate the possibility of your future self discovering how great of a photographer you really were back when you thought you really weren't what is your system for backing up and securing your files let me know in the comments below do you have a nas a raid a naz raid let me know in the comments i want to know what people are doing now if you found this video helpful please give it a thumbs up also consider subscribing and turning on the notifications so you don't miss any videos to help you run your photography business just a little bit better and finally if you have a friend or colleague who could benefit from this video please share it with them it's my mission to help as many photographers as i can build their studio one step at a time that's it for today thanks for listening [Music] and it should be the primary method which which primary method with which used