You love your photos and want to be able to keep them safe. Below you’ll find my best advice to make sure that you’ve got your photos, once, twice and three times and even four times safe.
Tip 1: Download ALL your photos as soon as you get them. Pic-time is a fantastic and secure way for me to host and deliver galleries to you, but you shouldn’t rely on just Pic-time to host your photos because galleries are archived over time. Download all your images in High Resolution (for prints) and Web Resolution (for other uses) and keep them on a separate, physical drive.
Tip 2: Upload your images to a secure cloud. There are a few services that I recommend. For Apple users, iCloud backs up your content for a monthly fee, and so does Google Drive’s Google Photos. The biggest benefit with these services is that they sync photos across different devices, creating multiple redundancies of your content.
For Amazon members, Amazon Prime comes with Amazon Photos unlimited photo storage that only a handful of folks I know utilize. Uploading photos onto Amazon is quick and easy, and even includes a plugin that syncs your files. There are other backup services too such as DropBox that create copies of your photos on the cloud. Whichever service you prefer, creating a cloud back up provides you the extra peace of mind and backup in case your physical drives are lost or compromised.
Tip 3: Use a physical drive back up at home. USB Sticks are widely available and are a good storage option. RAID drives are my go-to for physical storage. They create a second copy of data on each drive in case one fails. This means that your data is doubly protected. Choose a good RAID drive, and set it aside as a back up drive, but be careful about using this drive daily. More use means more exposure to dangers such as power surges, viruses, and accidental human error.
The extra mile: I keep a very heavy, locked, fireproof and waterproof safe at home where I store all my media cards after I photograph weddings and sessions. Combined with the above, this gives me the assurance that I have multiple back ups of just in case one falls through. The idea is to create multiple, secure redundancies of the same item that you can access in case something goes awry.
I hope these tips are helpful! Enjoy your photographs, friends.
