One of the first things that comes to mind in the face of some kind of disaster, fire or flooding, for example, is the safety of the people we love, when family and friends are well and within reach of our arms, in case of Before such a tragic event, people often think of their photos.
All this concern is justified! After all, photographs ensure that the memory of our children, parents, siblings, friends and the best days of our lives are immortalized in these images.
- And what about photographers.
- A much stronger concern.
- No doubt.
- A small slip can throw years of work and flash out the window.
- I’m sure you don’t want to come up with a elimination like that.
- For this reason.
- It makes sense.
- To always have a backup (save copy) of all or at least the most important photographs of your work.
Even if you choose to store images on a single computer, DVD or other simple storage medium, there’s no way to make sure your photos are 100% secure. After all, unfortunately all types of storage fail, it’s only a matter of time!
However, there is a way to eliminate the possibility of losing your photos almost completely. In this article for novice photographers, we’ll provide several basic low-cost backup tips. Even if you choose not to follow this backup strategy, it will also be useful to give you a decent starting point and help you figure out the way that best suits your needs.
It is important to note that we do not recommend this advice to professional photographers, as they need to have more serious, reliable and faster ways to safeguard their work, mainly because of the high added value of their photographs, as well as the amount of images that will be stored.
In addition to storing photos on your hard drive, it’s a good idea to have a backup on an external drive somewhere in your home, that is, if your computer is experiencing some kind of malfunction, data loss or physical damage, you can always rely on the backup to restore your files.
Note, however, that storing copies of your photos on the same source disk, that is, in another folder on your computer, is not a secure backup. When a hard drive (HD) is damaged, the original photos and backups will be lost. as long as they are stored on the same disk.
Note that you can also create a backup on an internal hard drive, separate from the one used by the operating system, called in HD Partition Computing. This way, if you need to format your computer, you will have all your important files intact.
Another amazing technique is partition duplication. Some hard drives already offer this built-in feature and, as a rule, is a faithful copy of your files on a second part of your hard drive. Basically, your hard drive is divided into two parts (1 and 2, for example), all files added to partition 1 are automatically copied to partition 2, without you having to do anything else.
The disadvantage of this configuration is that you lose storage capacity, which is usually reduced by half, this rule is simple, it would be the same as if today you duplicated all the files you have on your computer, logically, the space they occupy would be However, an HD of 1 terabyte is more than enough for most novice photographers to do this work.
Even if you’ve never had a data loss before, don’t think the chances of that happening are completely nil. Often, when you least imagine it, you may be surprised by an accident like this and inevitably losing the work of several years in photography It is better to avoid with a backup of your photos, right?
Even if you have a backup of your images at home, this won’t prevent serious accidents, such as a fire, for example. I don’t wish you anything wrong, but remember that the purpose of this article is to avoid the unexpected and protect your photos.
With very bad luck or a really unfortunate tragedy, internal and external records can be damaged, so it would be great to have another copy somewhere outside your home or workplace, just in case.
Taking advantage of the time you saved your photos in a second medium, as in the first step, create an additional copy and then consult with your family or friends to save this backup at home or in a safe place. Don’t have any trouble helping yourself!
Cloud backup is the online storage of your photos or any file. Do you know NETFLIX, SPOTIFY and PAYPAL?
Cloud backup services work the same way, so you’ll probably find one that meets your needs.
I’m sure you’ve heard of Dropbox, which is the most popular cloud storage platform today, with 2GB of free space to boot. Another great cloud storage platform is Google Drive, with 15GB of free storage capacity.
There are still a number of other options to choose from. If free storage isn’t enough, you can subscribe to a monthly or yearly fee to significantly increase your storage limit.
Some cloud storage providers allow you to purchase an unlimited amount of storage!Prices usually range from a few dollars to $10 per month and more, most are foreign.
Keep in mind that backing up your images to the cloud minimizes the risk of losing photos by a negligible percentage. It also gives you access to your images wherever you are, all you need is Internet access.
Organization is the key to keeping your photos well preserved and safe!
Keeping your images backed up in the same way your computer simplifies the backup and restore process. Therefore, it is a good idea to maintain the file structure and naming methodology among all sources.
Keeping everything organized also allows you to notice the loss of any file and thus prevent a small problem from becoming a big headache. In addition, keeping files in the same structure avoids copying duplicate files, for example by reducing their backup capacity.
Every day, once a week, every month or every year?There is no general rule, the more you save your photos, the better!
Start by gaining the habit of saving your photos in the way that suits you best; In other words, you can easily update your backup support on a daily basis, so do it!However, you can only do it every month, so do it!
A low backup frequency can be easily increased at any time, just know one thing: the lower the backup frequency you make, the more likely you are to have outdated files on your copy, in other words, if you have unforeseen events, you won’t have all your photos covered in your backup.
You can also use a specific software tool to manage and organize your photos, such as Lightroom or ACDSee. You’ll find import options that allow you to automatically back up to a predefined location.
However, if you choose otherwise, which is the manual method, I recommend that you back up your images at least once a week. Of course, the more movement you make to your files, the more frequently you will save and sync your files.
You may think that having 4 types of backups of your photos is on the verge of paranoia, but it won’t be easy to update all these fonts.
You don’t have to go to this end and you can choose one of the above methods to protect your photos. For example, you can sync images from your camera with your computer and create a link to the cloud backup, even free options, so the chances of losing your job are almost zero.
But, if you are an old guard and prefer physical backup, it is also a good option to make some copies on DVD and distribute them to certain backup locations. However, this mode will require more work to update the files on the backup media and it doesn’t make sense to have stale backups, right?
No matter how you choose to back up your photos, after all this varies from photographer to photographer, keep in mind that this is very important and you should not report it. Even if you’re at the beginning of your career as a photographer, take the time to think about how to protect your photos and keep your work intact for a long time.
I understand that most of the time we can only see a problem or a risk when it directly threatens us or someone very close to it goes through it. However, I wouldn’t wait to verify it!
As you saw in this article, there are 3 basic methods to save your photos, namely:
It can be a bit tedious to create an automatic backup system for your photos or have to pay for additional hardware to store your files, but it’s certainly even more painful to manually update all your photos on CD or DVD. Always learn that if anything happens to your photos, it will be much worse.
Ask yourself: how much would you be willing to spend on time and money to get these photos back?You’ll only spend a fraction of them to protect them if you do it properly and as soon as possible.
Now that you’ve seen some options to back up your photos, how about you start thinking about the security of your images right now?But, if you still have any questions on this topic, leave it in the comments below.
Oh, do you have any other tips on how to back up your photos?Enrich this article with your suggestions. This article is just the beginning of the discussion and we will be happy to hear from you.