Tip Tuesday: Backing Up Your Photos
A topic that has been on my mind recently is backing up photos/data. Since our world is very tech savvy these days; just about everything is on our computers. That means anything from homework to those precious photos is kept on your computer. What happens when your hard drive crashes? You are at risk for losing everything that is important to you. Those special hospital photos of when your son/daughter was born is now gone forever. Maybe even photos from your wedding day, or all of your tax documents are now history all because your hard drive crashed.
Something similar happened to me a couple years back, only it was one of my external hard drives. I had purchased an external hard drive to back up my photos, videos, personal documents, etc. I had pretty much everything from my computer on it. One day I hooked it up to my computer to access something I had stored on it, and discovered that about half of the files on the drive had been destroyed. Fortunately for me, the files were also on my husband's computer and another old laptop hard drive that was laying around. The files were all personal, but this shows how easy it is to lose something that is pretty important. Some of the files I had lost were of my son not long after he was born, so you could only imagine how I felt knowing that I may never have those photos again.
This is why I strongly suggest getting a couple external hard drives and backing everything up on them. You never know when you might lose something very dear to you, without the hope of getting it back. I always encourage clients to make sure the images from your photo session is backed up. Some people store these things on disks and USBs, but honestly something can very easily happen to these types of storage devices too. I have also had a USB bite the dust on me too, and it wasn't used very often. Just because you have something stored on an external hard drive, USB or disk doesn't mean that nothing will happen to it. It's very common for hard drives to crash and things to happen to USBs and disks. This is why I recommend backing everything up on more than one drive.
This brings me to another point. Since my hard drive crashed, I knew it was important for me to have something reliable and fairly safe to store client photos on while I am working on their session. I purchased a RAID system a while back (before I actually started doing paid photo sessions), and I feel this will help me have a piece of mind. For those of you who don't know what a RAID system is, it is a bank of hard drives that work together mirroring each other. If one or two drives crash they can easily be replaced, and everything that was stored on the old drives is still accessible. Nothing happens to the files stored there, and they are relatively safe. This does not mean that nothing can happen to them, but in the case that a hard drive crashes it is less likely that files will be lost. There are multiple types of RAID systems, but there are only a few types that actually protect you in the way I described. The price of these systems varies based on how much storage you want, and if you know anything about building these systems. The systems I have are pretty expensive. The older of the two (faster) is over $1,000 while the slightly slower one I built was just over $900. The cheaper one actually has more storage, but does not have the same data transfer rate as the more expensive system. I won't go into the details of the data transfer rates. If you really want to know more about it there are plenty of resources on Google that will explain it very clearly. Needless to say, I store all client images/video on these RAID systems to ensure that nothing is lost while I am responsible for them. This means that your very special moments are very safe with me.
When you're looking for a photographer, something you might want to ask them is how they store your images, and how/if they back them up. There are photographers out there who only store images on their computer's hard drive or only an external drive (that is not a RAID system). This leaves you open to having your images lost because of a hard drive failure. My system is not perfect, but there is less of a chance of having images lost especially when my storage habits are compared to a photographer/videographer who only stores these things on one drive.
Moral of the story... back up your photos, and check with your photographer/videographer about how they store their files otherwise you may lose moments that you will never get back.