Have you thought about what would happen if the computer where all of your photos are stored just stopped working? Have you ever lost your phone, or dropped it in a lake, losing all the photos stored on it? The time to think about it is before it happens. Before you have to go to one of the online photography forums and ask a question like: “my hard drive died” or “my memory card is corrupt” followed by “how do I get my photos back?” The easy answer is that you retrieve them from one of your backups. Unfortunately, way too often your important photos stored in just one place. And when that storage location is damaged or lost, all those images are gone. If you are lucky, you may be able to pay a recovery service to retrieve them. If not, the photos are gone. How do you prevent this?
Back when all cameras used film, your photos were on slides or negatives, and from those you could make prints. It was possible but difficult to duplicate film, so most of the time there was one copy. You had to store important images in a very safe place. Today with digital photography, it is extremely simple to make as many copies as you want, since the images are stored on the computer. It just takes a little effort to set up a process.
The Best Photo Backup For Your Devices
I have been an IT professional for over 20 years, and a working photographer for over 10 years. Preventing data loss is something that I have worked on at many levels. My first hard lesson was in college when I lost a large project that was due the next day due to a disk failure. Since then I have worked hard to plan for data loss, and to keep reliable backups. I have applied these methods to the protection of my digital photos, and here are a few tips to help you as well.
5 Tips For Protecting Your Valuable Photos
- Hard drives fail. It’s not a matter of IF, but WHEN it will happen. Many drives are made of movable parts which eventually wear out. SSD’s and memory cards do not have movable parts and can be slightly more reliable. But nothing is 100%, and I won’t bet my images on when that storage device will fail.
- If a photo is not in at least 3 places, it’s not safe. Back up soon, and back up often.
- Hard disk storage is cheap. You can get external USB drives, and put your images on multiple drives.
- Utilize a cloud photo backup solution to keep a copy of your photos away from your home and your physical computer.
- Keep it simple. If your backup process is complex, you won’t do it, or at least you won’t keep it up to date.
Backup Tools To Keep Your Photos Safe
- External USB hard drives are relatively inexpensive. You can attach one to your computer, make copies of your images, and you quickly have them in two places. Where this solution starts to get cumbersome is when you have too many photos to fit on your computer, and you to begin keeping some on your computer, and archiving some of your older ones. So the simple external hard drives are not as good for professional photographers, or amateurs that have a very large photo library.
- A more expensive, but more convenient storage solution is a RAID device. These look like one disk drive to your computer but have redundant components inside to help prevent the loss of information. And while these can be more convenient to use, they will require a little more initial work to configure. They also allow for a lot more storage space. The more space you need, the more you will spend, but you can put all of your photos in one place, and redundancy is built in to protect against disk failures.
- While it is good to have files stored on multiple hard drives, it is also important to have copies stored someplace besides your house, away from your computer. If your house is burglarized, or you experience a fire or a flood, your local backups will likely be lost. So cloud photo backup is critical for the safekeeping of your files.
The easiest way to keep a local backup is to get an external USB drive, and use software such as Time Machine on a Mac, or by using the built-in Backup utility or a 3rd party backup for Windows 10. These tools will allow you to have a copy of your files both on your computer, as well as on an external drive. That’s two copies, but don’t forget, you need 3! We still need to get copies saved in the cloud.
There are many choices for cloud photo backups. One that I like is SmugMug. Full disclosure, I am in the SmugMug affiliate program. If you follow one of these links to their site, I will get a commission if you sign up. But I was a customer long before I was in their affiliate program, and here are some of the features that make their service a good solution.
Advantages of SmugMug for Cloud Photo Backup
- It’s simple. Set it up and forget it and the photos from your phone or your computer will upload to a private gallery on the SmugMug servers in the cloud.
- Unlimited photo storage. All of their plans from Basic on up allow unlimited photo storage.
- Photos from all of your devices go to the same place. Whether it’s your phone, tablet, or laptop, you can have your images uploaded.
- No compression. Unlike some services that compress your JPG images to save space, your images are stored on SmugMug the same as they are on your device.
- Besides storage, you can easily share your images and order professional quality prints from SmugMug.
- If you want to try it out, they have a 14-day free trial.
This solution will work really well for photos but don’t forget other important files. On SmugMug you can store JPG, GIF, PNG, and Apple HEIC format files. Other formats such as RAW camera files, and files for Adobe Photoshop are not yet supported. Services like DropBox will work for many other types of files. And it will also work for photos. However, some services get a little pricey when you start storing large numbers of photos. I highly recommend checking into the safe, secure, and unlimited photo storage provided by SmugMug.
Whatever solution you come up with, just remember to keep your files in multiple places, and get a copy of them stored off-site. I have had hard drives in a computer fail, as well as external USB drives. And so far, I have always been able to retrieve my important files from other locations.