The Backup Strategy
That Will Save Every Photographer’s Life
Ever get that sinking feeling when you are editing an image in Photoshop, tweaking a social media promo in Canva or putting those finishing touches on your latest blog post and your computer crashes? Have you ever had to recreate hours of concentrated effort? Have you ever had a hard drive fail with the only copy of your work? In the past 20 years, all of these have happened to me at least once and I’ll bet they have to you as well. Below are the failsafe strategies I recommend for backing up your working files and digital archive to protect your precious creations, and your time.
Make it Redundant
Make it Redundant
Make it Redund…
You know how you have to tell your team and clients the same exact thing a zillion times before it sticks? Well a solid backup routine also needs redundancy to be effective and secure it into memory. My favorite solution is three-tiered: internal, external and off-site (preferably cloud-based).
Internal storage
There are several things you can do to ensure the health of your first vital originals (master files). It’s ideal to update your computer’s hard drives or laptop every three to five years according to studies on the failure rate of drives. It’s not a matter of if a hard drive will fail but when. I keep working files on my desktop. In my case, these live on the main hard drives of either my laptop (a 16” MacBook Pro) or an ancient desktop Mac Pro circa 2010 (omg!). I’ve kept up with installing new drives / ram so it still functions surprisingly well for less critical work and has some software that I keep it around for (just don’t ask it to update to the latest OS or Creative Cloud or it will laugh at you). But I digress. For optimal performance, keep an eye on how much space you are using on any given hard drive. Keeping them less than 50% full is good practice. You always want to have adequate room to copy all your photos over from a shoot and to save your gigabyte plus, multi-layered retouching masterpieces. Your drives will run more smoothly when they are less full (can you relate?!). When not on location, I keep my laptop on my workstation plugged in to an APC battery backup, along with my external monitors and and external drives. (Look for a battery backup that adequately covers your power consumption with some room to grow.) That way, if there’s a power outage or a fuse blows, I always have some precious battery life left to save where I’m at. I also obsessively save as I go to inoculate against a software issue (spinning wheel of death). Cmd+S (PC: Ctrl+S) is your friend!
External backup
Now that you have taken care to save your master files safely, let’s talk about your first dupe. I frequently back up my working files to my external raid system in the course of a workday, where they will be stored permanently. My raid is my living file archive, and actually has built-in redundancy. With the raid 1 setup, there is an identical version of every file I copy over on each of the two hard drives in a mirrored pair (array). While I’m still working on a job, that means I actually have three local copies. When a job is wrapped, I double check that its entire folder, including all updates I’ve made to individual files, were successfully copied to the raid (ChronoSync is a useful software for this). If you don’t have a raid as I do, you may wish to keep your master files on an internal drive, and your first backup on an external drive. There are many possible permutations of this. What matters less are the details and more that you have all the requisite copies – 1. master files, 2. local backup, 3. off-site backup (our next step).
Off-site backup
You’ve got a backup plan already but there are more what-ifs to guard against, some of them more likely than others. Your computer could fry, your external enclosure could fail, your home could sustain flood or fire damage, a nasty virus could infect the world’s population (oh wait, that was covid, but you could still get hit by malware), or you could accidentally write over both copies of your mammoth res’ed up Times Square billboard artwork with an insta-sized JPG. Enter the cloud! Here’s what I love about cloud-based solutions for off-site backups—they do it automagically! The day I bought a subscription for Backblaze was the day my backup strategy became seamless and easy. I will never look back (except if I lose a file, which has happened). Some commercial studios I work with implement a physical off-site backup solution, which works too. A backup drive is brought back and forth from the studio to say the photographer’s home and updated on a regular basis, especially after a big job. In order to ensure files exist off-site in between, job files are uploaded at EOD via FTP. Such manual off-site backups require energy, commitment and diligence though. I prefer the set it and forget it solution that the cloud offers as it’s a huge time saver and comes with auxiliary advantages. I was recently hired for a commercial lifestyle shoot in Cleveland, OH and was traveling with my laptop. I wanted access to a word doc while I was out there to follow up on an email, but I was away from my file archive. Because I back up all my hard drives to the cloud, I was able to easily search through my mirrored file structure online, locate the file I wanted and download it to my laptop over the hotel WIFI. A note of caution for cloud users: be sure to check the backup procedures of any cloud-based backup solutions you subscribe to. For example, there’s a maximum amount of time that an external drive can be disconnected from the computer you have registered before Backblaze will delete it from your remote backups. You should periodically check what is being backed up within the app and that it is running. Open their emails too—they will alert you if you have a hard drive offline for an extended period of time, etc. If you don’t need the robustness of a service like Backblaze, Amazon includes a cloud backup service for your photos with your Prime subscription for no additional cost.
Free up Storage
You may eventually need to reclaim space on your computer if you are using your desktop (or main hard drive) like me to save your original working files. I usually let files / folders on my desktop be for at least a week, and sometimes much longer. As long as you have the storage capacity, it’s not going to hurt you to have an extra copy for a bit longer than you need to! When I’m ready to do some housekeeping, I’ll check and double check that I have my two local copies on my raid and one off-site. Only then will I trash my desktop version of the same. Your methods may vary, but be deliberate and consistent because doing so will help prevent you from accidentally deleting something you need.
Maintain Multiple Versions
Another important part of my workflow is to store versions of files when I make major changes so I can go back and compare them as desired (ie: client-img-0009_v01.psd, client-img-0009_v02.psd). Sometimes I end up liking elements from an earlier go, or just want to maintain saved out versions for specific purposes—say one formatted for print and another for social (ie: client-img-0009_v02-16×20.jpg, client-img-0009_v02-fb.jpg). I also save out versions for my commercial retouching clients while exploring options and many sets of eyes have to weigh in. Sometimes we go back to a thrown out version even a year or so down the line because of a change so I always keep them. In addition to saving out versions in this way, you may want to consider using something like Apple’s built-in TimeMachine. You will need a hard drive with ample space for your current archive, cumulative versions and room to grow. It will continuously back up whatever you select for inclusion, saving a new snapshot any time you modify a file or folder (as scheduled or on demand). Did you you make a major operator error (like saving a flattened image over your layered retouched psd)? Did your Lightroom catalogue get corrupted in the middle of an operation? Are you desperate to go back to the very latest edits, rather than the last time you archived it (saving hours of culling and color correction)? Did you delete half of your blog post with a key stroke then save and quit before realizing? With TimeMachine, you can just “go back in time” to an earlier version and recover the one you want. By the way, if your cloud backup software hasn’t uploaded the latest version yet, you could recover the prior version that way instead—if you’re quick!
Let’s Discuss
What about you? Do you have a similar routine or will you now implement any of this approach? Do you have something that works better for you? Drop a comment below…
Shine on set,
Leila
