Backing Up Your Digital Photography Images

Digital photography has boomed over the last 10 years. With affordable, point & shoot and DSLR cameras, film has found a backseat to this new medium. Unfortunately, there’s a price to pay with digital technology; the potential for loss of data or your photos; I know first hand since I have had a 1TB drive fail on me with client photos as well as a digital Compact Flash go bad after a wedding shoot. The cost of recovery can be high, as much as a few thousand dollars! If you’re a professional photographer like me, then you have no choice but to pay to get your data restored. If you’re a casual photographer, you may not want to spend the money. The alternative is to download frequently and back-up your photos.

If you have not already been told, let me be the first to break the news to you, at some point, you will experience a hard drive failure, corrupt digital flash card (because they do eventually go bad), drop your camera into a lake or down a cliff, or have your camera stolen. I have heard countless stories from people who wished they had backed up or downloaded their photos because one of the former happened to them. In this blog post, I’m going to discuss the simplicity of backing up your data to ensure that  you won’t lose the memories you have captured and endure the heartache and cost that so many have, including me.

Five Simple Steps To Protect Your Valuable Digital Photos

1. Download images frequently: I can’t stress this enough! Every time you take photos at a family function or professional event, download the images to your computer. Don’t leave them on your camera or flash (memory) card/stick. Either connect your camera to your computer or remove the flash card and connect by using a connection adapter. Get them off the camera!
2. Create a folder for your new photos on your desktop: Depending on your work flow, this step may vary. I download images via a Compact Flash adapter, right into Adobe Lightroom. Two copies of my RAW files are created, one on my desktop and one on an external hard drive as a back-up. Your’ work flow may be simple; it may just entail downloading from the camera to your images folder. Regardless of your work flow, just make sure you know where your images are being stored so you can access them.
3. Burn photos to Gold Archival Discs: Once I have all of my RAW files, in some cases you may be shooting in jpeg or tiff format, I immediately burn a copy of my newly downloaded project to Gold Archival Discs. These disks are designed to last a long time, 300 years! Remember, there are gold colored discs and then there are gold archival discs. You want to get the latter; they will say “archival” on the packaging. Once you burn your images to the gold archival discs, put them in a safe place; preferably in a fireproof safe or box. You won’t really need to use the disc, unless something happens to your other backed-up data. Here’s a link if you’re interested in ordering Gold Archival Discs: Memorex 80 min./700MB 52x Pro Gold Archival CDR (5 Pack)
4. Back-up to a standard disc or DVD: After you have made your Archival back-up, I suggest making a copy on a standard CD or DVD. This way you can use it to share with friends and family, or transfer to another computer, or even take to a photo processing center, like Target or Costco. By making a standard back-up, you are preventing damages or loss to your archived disc.
5. Back-up to an external hard drive: You’re going to probably want to print, share, and often refer to the photos you took. I suggest you invest in a good hard drive with lots of memory, i.e. 500GB or more, You can store your images on the external drive, freeing up space on your computer hard drive. It also allows you to gain access to your images quicker than having to look for them on the back-up disks you made.

Digital Photography Back-up Work flow Diagram

You may think the system is redundant, however, until you lose your photos due to data loss, you will not truly appreciate the above back-up system. I would rather err on the side of caution rather than take my chances, as I have in the past and have lost valuable photos.

In addition to backing up, I will leave you with one other bit of advice. If you’re photographing family or professional events, use more memory cards with lower storage capacity. For example, when I shoot weddings, I tend to use 2GB and 4GB cards. I do this because if I lose data on a card, I only lose a small portion of what I was shooting. I hear photographers brag about their 16GB cards and micro drives. It’s these same photographers who end up crying because they lose the entire photo shoot, photographed on one card. It’s better to invest in a few cards than, just carrying one.

One Response to “Backing Up Your Digital Photography Images”

1. computer running slow says:

   October 1, 2010 at 6:22 pm

   Brilliant blog about Backing Up Your Digital Photography Images | Communication Arts – Photography – Digital Art – Design, it’s stopped me from doing any work

   Reply