Imagine. You have all of your wedding images on your laptop. You keep meaning to get around to backing them up, but you just haven’t gotten to it yet. You are hurrying to get to work, laptop in hand, and some crashes into you as you are trying to get into your work building. CRASH. Your laptop is destroyed and with it, all of your wedding images. This is devastating. Although your photographer likely still has them on their online proofing gallery and you can request to download them again, what about the ones friends texted, emails, Instastoried, SnapChatted, etc? They were all on there.

I have a confession, I’ve been there. When I moved out of my studio at the end of 2014, I had already moved ALL of the weddings, portraits, & engagements over to the brand new external hard drive, but not my personal photos. I knocked over the hard drive and it chattered. I cried for a week…ok sometimes I still cry at the thought of Bryce’s newborn pictures are just gone. All I have is what was on Facebook.

Chris, being the technology nerd that he is, has always said “it’s not a matter of IF the technology will fail, it’s a matter of WHEN.” Thank God for his experience as an IT in the Navy because he has been pivotal in our business, making sure everything is backed up properly.

How we back up a wedding/session

1. First, when we get home, he immediately takes all the RAW files and puts them on an external hard drive that withstand the extreme heat and cold. Once they are all loaded, he immediately puts it in our car’s glove box…just in case there was a fire.
2. Second, we have an in-office mirrored external hard drive in the house. Which basically means we have 2 externals that have EXACTLY the same things on them. He then loads them to a third external hard drive that we swap back & forth with the Lightroom catalogs on.
3. Third, after we’ve done significant work to the images like cull, edit, etc, we update the mirrored external hard drive with the swapping drive. That way if the power goes out, nothing I just spent hours doing is lost.
4. Last, when we export and upload the final images to Zenfolio to release to the client, we are also uploading them to an external hard-drive & Amazon Prime. That’s 3 ways we are backing them up. 

Some inexpensive solutions for you to also take the necessary steps to back up your own images is to use Amazon Prime, iCloud, Google Drive, have all sets of parents download them to their computers. The list is endless. I’m a big believer in 3’s and making she that all 3 are in different locations.