Why You Need To Back Up Your Photos
As photographers photos are extremely crucial to us and if you are not backing up your photos, you could be in for a nasty surprise.
Reasons For Backing Up
Save Yourself from feeling depressed.
Imagine that you have thousands of images and your hard drive was to crash suddenly, just picture the deviating emotions you would experience knowing your photos are gone forever.
Photos are a part of who we are as photographers.
Also, photos are part of who we are as photographers, so losing a photo is like losing a part of our identity.
Photos are captured moments in time.
Not to mention that our photos are capturing moments of our lives that we don’t want to forget.
Don't become a part of a horror story.
I have heard countless horror stories were someone lost their collections of photos and were completely devastated. Do you want to be one of them?
Suggestions For Backing Up
I have heard it said that photographers need to be backing up their photos to at least two different locations, this could be two separate hard drives or one local hard drive and one in the cloud. I feel that the more copies of your work you have, the less chance of you losing your precious photos.
Remote Storage
Also, you might want to consider keeping one of your hard drives in a different location, such as having one at home and one at your office. In case there were to be some kind of disaster at one of those locations, you would still be able to obtain your other hard drive.
Cloud Storage
Also, it is a good idea to look into a cloud storage solution for keeping your photos backed up. One I used to use quite frequently was Shoebox, but unfortunately, they went out of business. The one I currently use is Google Drive, but I know a lot of photographers like Backblaze. One of the benefits of having a cloud storage backup is that, you can access it from anywhere and that it is usually backed up to a remote location, in case a natural disaster were to hit your area, you would be comfortable knowing you have that cloud backup.
How to Backup
Backup Software
There are software programs you can buy, that mirror your hard drives so when you add something new to one hard drive, it gets copied to the other one as well. Some hard drives also come with free software that allows you to do this. The one I currently use is Carbon Copy Cloner. Note this software is only for Mac.
RAID Hard Drives
Synology is a company that allows for RAID backups of your files, but can be somewhat expensive if don’t have that many photos or are just a hobbyist. As far as cloud backups go, the company you choose to go with will most likely have software for your computer that runs in the background for syncing your files to their cloud service.
Lightroom CC Backups
The good news is that if you’re using Adobe Lightroom CC it can automatically store your files in Adobe’s Cloud. Note that this does not happen for the classic version of Lightroom. Also, I will include a video, on how to select a destination to back up your photos in Lightroom Classic, that I hope you will find helpful.
Video On Backing Up In Lightroom CC Classic
Note the video is based on Lightroom 5, but will also work with newer versions of Lightroom as well.
Share Time
If you have found this post useful please feel free to share and comment on this post. Also, what are some of your strategies for backing up your photos? Please feel free to share by commenting below.