The Importance of Backing Up Your Digital Images

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Dec 1

Portrait Photography tips in Elk Grove, CA.

the importance of backing up digital photo images

Digital photography over the years has really changed the industry for photographers on the options they give to their clients. It used to be you could get prints from your photographer and maybe a proof album, but nothing in terms of negatives or backup of those images. You could scan them into your computer for safety, but the quality would be diminished. Now with the age of digital, photographers offer their client’s actual digital downloads for them to keep on their devices and print or share with ease. It doesn't matter if you're a professional photographer, a mom juggling a family, or a hobbyist photographer your photos are valuable. They are art pieces, one-of-a-kind snapshots of moments that will never happen again, and a unique reflection of the way you see the world. So, what happens to those precious images if you suddenly have a computer that crashes, and all your images are lost forever to the black screen of death.

Digital has done a lot of amazing things for the photography world, but it has had a major drawback. You see, your digital photos are more vulnerable than film photos. Obviously, film photos must be protected, too, and negatives can be easy to lose. They can be destroyed by fire or lost in a move, but for the most part, they can be safely locked away in a safe location. However, now that photographers are primarily digital and offer digitals to their customers, this creates a possible problem of big proportions. All it takes is for one hard drive failure, or mobile device crash, and images are gone forever. Digital media is very prone to have failures. Here are a few ways we can lose our photos:

Electricity spike fries hard drive or computer
Computer becomes old and crashes
We drop or phone, hard drive, or laptop
Fires, floods, and other natural disasters
Hard Drive Failure for no apparent reason
Corruption of individual files
Stolen phone, camera, computer

If you keep your files on one device for a long period of time you are courting danger because it is not “if” it will happen, but when it will happen when it comes to a technological failure.

One of the very first things I encourage my clients to do upon downloading their digital images from their gallery is to immediately backup up their image files.

I recently saw an article on backing up images and they outlined a 3-2-1 system to for your photo backup.

3 – Make a copy of your images to a backup source that is the same type of media

2 – Print your images

1 – Copy of the photos offsite

Here is how it would work.

STEPS TO BACKING UP IMAGES:

START WITH AN LOCAL BACKUP OF YOUR IMAGES.

The first step after downloading your gallery images onto your computer is to copy them to an external hard drive. External hard drives are not that expensive and are great for storing copies of files and images. These are small physically and are easy to grab if you need to leave quickly. Most computers can be set up to make a backup to run frequently to this external hard drive. I would also recommend backing up to a portable thumb drive as well. Better to have the copies of your images on a few different devices.

PRINT YOUR PHOTOS – this is also a photo backup

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you PRINT your photos. This can be done a little at a time. Even if you are just printing proof size copies, it is better to have a hard copy of your images.

ONE COPY OFFSITE

The easiest way this works is to back up to the cloud through the internet. There are several different options for doing this. There is Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, and other cloud-based companies where you can backup your images. I personally use Carbonite to back up my entire computer files including client images.

Another option for offsite storage is to keep a copy of a backup of your images on a thumb drive and put it in a safe deposit box.

While I do backup my client images and have multiple backups it would take a lot of time and effort to find a session on my backups to send back to the client. It is always better for a client to have their own backup system for their images. My client gallery also stores a backup copy of the galleries; however, they have to go back into their archive system which they charge a fee for which I have to pass on to the client. So bottom line I HIGHLY RECOMMEND and encourage my clients to make multiple backups of their digital images that they purchase through their online gallery of their session images.