My Professional Photo Backup Routine – 2025

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It’s the start of another year, and I’m upgrading a few elements of my photography backup system with new products and larger-capacity drives purchased during the Black Friday sales at the end of last year. Over the years, I’ve heard too many photo-loss horror stories not to take my photography backup routine seriously, so I’m constantly refining my setup, testing new technologies, and reviewing currently recommended industry advice.

Every year, I get emails from people telling me they have lost all their photos due to some drive failure or, increasingly, due to natural disasters. I hope this ongoing series of posts helps some of you to implement your rock-solid backup plans. This series of posts dates back nearly ten years, and the historical entries in this series are chock-full of helpful tidbits to help you secure your photos.

Backup Basics

Before describing my current setup, it’s important for you to understand what we call a 3-2-1 backup strategy. This “rule” or strategy, whatever you want to call it, is the foundation of a solid backup routine that will remove all the risks of you ever losing your photos.

3-2-1 Strategy

I have written a detailed article about the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which you should read if you are unfamiliar with it. If you need a refresher, here it is: A 3-2-1 backup strategy states that you should have at least three total copies of every file. Two of which are local (at home or in your office), but on different devices. One more copy is kept offsite. Further on in this post, you’ll see how I accomplish each of these three copies of my photos.

RAID is NOT a backup

Another fundamental concept to understand is that a RAID device is not a backup! Too many people make this critical mistake. A RAID can be one of your two local copies, but it cannot be both. If you accidentally delete or corrupt a file on a RAID, that file is also instantly deleted or corrupted on the RAID’s second copy. So you can see that this is not, in and of itself, a backup. RAID is for the continuity of business. More details on this topic can be found in this previous article.

Budgeting is important

When people tell me they have lost their photos, whether it be their entire archive or just a day’s worth of shooting for a client, another point continually comes up. Some people understand the importance of a 3-2-1 strategy but then fail to leave enough room in their photo gear budget to buy the necessary drives to accomplish it. Sadly, this is something I have heard all too often.

When people think about saving up for new camera gear, they set aside money for the sexy stuff, like a new camera or a new lens. Most people don’t bother to think about putting money aside for new hard drives. Don’t make this mistake. And again, I have another detailed post discussing this topic—more great foundational stuff on photo backup strategies.

My Photography Backup System

Primary Location – OWC Thunderbay 8

OWC Thunderbay 8

I used to run a QNAP TVS-472XT NAS as my primary photo storage location but switched to an OWC Thunderbay 8 DAS after getting tired of the constant need to perform firmware and system updates to the NAS (network-attached storage). A NAS can be a valuable tool if you need to make its data simultaneously accessible to multiple users on the same network. Still, there’s a learning curve when working with any networked device, and all too often, I found myself needing to dig around in online support forums trying to figure out weird quirks. I just don’t have time for that, and I don’t need the data accessible to others.

The OWC Thunderbay 8 is an 8-bay RAID device that connects directly to a single computer using a Thunderbolt 3 cable with a Type-C connector. The Thunderbay 8 supports RAID 0, 1, 1+0 (10), 4, 5, and JBOD configurations using OWC’s excellent SoftRaid software for setup, drive health monitoring and configuration. I installed 8x16TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives in mine, giving me 112TB of space in a RAID5 configuration. (16TB is the current sweet spot in the $/TB calculation as of 2025)

I have been running the Thunderbay 8 as my primary storage for over a year and have been thrilled with the hardware’s performance and the accompanying software’s functionality. Hard drives are mechanical devices, so they will eventually fail. OWC’s SoftRaid software constantly checks the health of the drives in the Thunderbay to warn you of bad sectors that increase the probability of imminent drive failure 20-50x. Armed with this knowledge, you can preemptively replace bad disks within the RAID.

Secondary Location – Another Thunderbay 8

Having had so much success with my primary Thunderbay 8, I decided to switch things up for 2025 and buy a second Thunderbay 8 to function as my second copy. When Drobo went bankrupt a few years ago and stopped updating its software, I ditched my old Drobo 5D as my secondary location. At the time, I was new to using the OWC Thunderbay 8 as a primary location; therefore, I hesitated to jump straight into using two of them. I wanted to put the Thunderbay to the test before using it as a second location. In the interim, I ran a pair of 22TB SanDisk Professional drives as a secondary location. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to mirror the contents of my primary Thunderbay 8 to those two drives every night.

While this solution worked fine to create that secondary copy of my files as part of my 3-2-1 backup routine, singular hard drives like the Sandisk Professional drives lack the business continuity benefits of a RAID device. If one of those 22TB drives had failed, I’d still have two more copies of the files–one on my primary location and one on my tertiary offsite storage solution. However, there would be a brief period when my 3-2-1 system lacked its second copy while awaiting a replacement drive from Amazon.

This never happened. I never lost one of those 22TB drives, but it was always on my mind. This year, after scoring a fantastic deal on 16TB IronWolf Pro drives during Black Friday, it was time to shore things up even more with the second Thunderbay 8. Now, with a RAID5 device as my secondary location, a drive could fail in this secondary Thunderbay 8, and I’d still be able to continue using the device.

In other words, if I have to wait for a replacement drive to arrive in the mail, my 3-2-1 system will still be 100% functional. This felt all the more important to me as a national postal strike in Canada left the whole country without mail deliveries for a month at the end of 2024. Where I live in the Yukon, no physical stores sell 16TB hard drives, so I must rely on the postal service.

As I have done for over a decade, Carbon Copy Cloner creates this secondary backup. Every night, the software compares the contents of my primary Thunderbay 8 to the secondary Thunderbay 8 and copies any new files. At the same time, it will delete any files off the secondary device if they have been deleted from the primary while creating a Snapshot (like Apple’s Time Machine) that allows me to roll back the content of the file system to a previous date if anything were to be accidentally deleted. Both my primary and secondary Thunderbay 8 devices sit stacked on the desk in my office.

Tertiary Offsite Copy – Backblaze

For years, I kept a 5-bay Drobo in a pelican case stashed at a friend’s office some 50km from mine. The separation was intended to protect against large wildfires–an increasing issue. As I write this, the catastrophic LA wildfires are still burning and have now wiped out over 10,000 buildings and claimed 20+ lives. Keeping a third copy of your photos in an offsite location is necessary to complete a 3-2-1 backup system, but please keep the fire threats in mind. For example, storing your offsite copy at your neighbor’s house is a terrible idea. Most wildfires that come into contact with urban areas will obliterate an entire neighbourhood. I dread to think how many people lost all their photos in the current LA fires because they didn’t have a sufficient backup plan.

While my previous Drobo-in-a-box offsite setup was an OK solution, it required me to collect it every month or so and perform a cloning operation. This meant there would be times when the offsite copies were out of sync with my primary and secondary copies. Up here in the Yukon, we don’t have the best internet connection speeds, and for years, this prevented me from using a cloud backup system for my offsite copy. Drobo’s bankruptcy forced my hand, though. After updating my Mac’s operating system, connecting a Drobo to my computer was no longer possible.

Enter Backblaze. Around the time of Drobo’s demise, Elon Musk’s Starlink service started putting pressure on the previously captive market dominated by the Yukon’s mediocre internet service provider. Perhaps as a result, slightly faster connection speeds became available at lower prices. So, instead of replacing my offsite Drobo with a third OWC Thunderbay 8, I used Backblaze to mirror my primary Thunderbay 8 to the cloud. The initial upload of over 40TB of photos and videos took a while (be patient!), but once that was done, it was smooth sailing.

Backblaze runs in the background. Whenever it detects a new or changed file on my computer or a connected drive, it uploads it to the cloud. Suppose a file is deleted from my computer or a connected drive. In that case, it still keeps the file in the cloud for up to a year, allowing you to quickly recover accidentally deleted files, as long as you realize within 365 days. Best of all, Backblaze Personal costs just $99/year for unlimited storage space! It’s an unbelievably good deal.

Time Machine

Time Machine is Apple’s set-and-forget backup system that allows you to quickly recover accidentally deleted files or restore a computer that has experienced a failure of its internal drive. I don’t recommend using Time Machine to back up your primary photo storage devices because it requires disks that are several times the capacity of the drives it is backing up. However, I recommend using Time Machine to back up your computer’s internal drive.

I used to have a separate external 6TB drive as a Time Machine backup for my Mac Studio’s internal 2TB SSD. I’m switching things up this year and will use one of the eight drives in my secondary OWC Thunderbay 8 as a Time Machine. One of the great things about Thunderbay paired with OWC’s SoftRaid software is that you can configure multiple volumes on the same device. My primary Thundebay 8 uses all eight drives to create a single RAID5 volume. But my secondary Thunderbay 8 uses seven of the drives to create a RAID5 volume, while the drive in the final bay is formatted to Apple’s AFPS file system as designated as my Time Machine.

The flexibility of the Thunderbay + Softraid combination is what makes it so awesome. If you wanted to, you could create four different 2-disk RAID1 volumes in the Thunderbay 8 or two 2-disk RAID1 volumes and a 4-disk RAID5 volume. Those eight disk bays are yours to do as you please.

Bootable Clone? Gone!

It used to be standard practice to create a bootable clone of your computer’s internal drive that could be used if that drive experienced a catastrophic failure. Carbon Copy Cloner performed that duty for me, but recent changes to the security features in Apple’s operating system now make this impossible. It’s not a huge loss since SSD failure rates are low, and I run Time Machine, which can also perform a restore if necessary. The only downside is that if a computer does experience an internal SSD failure, you can no longer get up and running immediately by booting off the clone. Internal SSDs are not user-replaceable anyway, so the computer would need a trip to the Apple service centre either way.

If this ever happens to me, I’m prepared in two ways: First, I have a laptop that would allow me to continue working immediately. I’d plug my Thunderbay 8 devices into the laptop and then I’d pull a copy of my Lightroom catalog off my Time Machine drive and work with that until my desktop machine was replaced or repaired (depending on the age). When the new or repaired machine arrived, I’d plug in the Time Machine drive, and Apple’s clever setup procedure would effectively use that to create a clone of my old machine.

I’m mentioning the removal of a bootable clone from my backup procedure in this post because it was still implemented the last time I wrote about my backup system. Since I don’t expect Apple to change its ways, this will be the last entry in this series that discusses bootable clones.

Backups on the Road

OWC Express 1M2

On-the-road backups can present a challenge when satisfying a 3-2-1 backup policy. On a photo expedition or multi-day photo safari, creating two copies of your photos is easy enough, but getting that third off-site copy is a challenge.

My current travel setup uses a 4TB OWC Express 1M2 USB4 SSD as the primary drive. This is the fastest SSD I have ever tested, reaching speeds over 3000MB/s. The speed of this drive ensures I can get the maximum download speeds of CFexpress Type B or Type A cards, as well as lightning-fast performance while culling or editing photos in Lightroom.

Of course, having a single copy of your files is insufficient, so this OWC 1M2 drive is copied to a second 4TB drive every night. The second drive doesn’t need to be as fast or expensive as the first since I won’t be working off it. For this reason, my secondary drive is a 4TB Crucial X9 SSD. This USB3.2 drive is still fast for a USB3 drive but doesn’t hold a candle to a USB4 drive. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to mirror the first drive to the second driver every night, and I keep that second drive in my camera bag or pant pocket. I never leave it in the same location as the first drive to protect against theft from my accommodation.

The Crucial X9 Pro is small enough to fit in my camera bag or pant pocket, so I always have a copy of my latest photos with me when I’m on the road.

Splitting up my first and second drives creates a hybrid between the second and third copies in a 3-2-1 backup system. For many, this is the best you can hope for on the road. While it’d be nice to upload a copy of the day’s shooting to the cloud every night, I regularly shoot over 500GB of images daily, and it’s simply impossible to get that uploaded overnight with the usually limited hotel or lodge internet connections.

Another thing you can consider is a partial cloud backup, and I will do this if I have the time and an internet connection. After ingesting my images from my cards to the primary drive and mirroring that drive to the secondary drive, I’ll review my pictures and flag all the A-grade keepers from the day. I’ll then use Lightroom’s export function to export those flagged RAW files to a folder on my computer that syncs to Dropbox. With some luck, those extra unique keepers will find enough upload bandwidth overnight to get into the cloud.

Where to Buy

As always, using my links for your purchases is appreciated. The drives, services, and devices discussed in this article are available at the links below.

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Professional photographer based in Yukon, Canada, and founder of Shutter Muse. His editorial work has been featured in publications all over the world, and his commercial clients include brands such as Nike, Apple, Adobe and Red Bull.

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14 thoughts on “My Professional Photo Backup Routine – 2025”

  1. Thanks for the 3-2-1 update!

    Years ago I switched from Carbon Copy Cloner (when I needed an update) to ChronoSync for my nightly copying chores. I still use CCC for some light tasks but have never looked back from ChronoSync. Have you tried or reviewed it?

    Long ago, during fire season living in the Southwest U.S., I decided not to rely on an off-site backup in close geographical proximity. That’s when I purchased BackBlaze, which is a great application. You kinda gloss over the time required for that first backup, however. Probably better to just write that folks ought not get discouraged. It took many weeks for my first backup! I just kept reminding myself that it was one step back for many steps forward in terms of photo file safety.

    Reply
    • Hi Wilbur. I haven’t tried ChronoSync. CCC has always done everything I needed it to. What does ChronoSync do that CCC can’t do? Why did you switch?

      Regarding the first Backblaze backup, I didn’t intentionally gloss over it. It’s just that many people only have a handful of TBs of images, not the 40+TB that I have. Also, most people have FAR better internet connections than I have. It’s glacial up here in the Far North, no pun intended. Yeah, my first backup did take weeks, but it didn’t matter since I already had an offsite copy elsewhere. My expectation is that for the average user on an average connection, their first upload should be done in a few days. I don’t want to discourage people from giving it a go because once it’s up and running, I think it will save some people’s bacon! I will add a “be patient” note to the article.

      Reply
  2. I think there are are limitations with the Backblaze $99 plan when it comes to external drives. I read it in a lot of places, specially Reddit, that if you backup an external drive on this plan and disconnect the drive, Backblaze will delete the backed up contents of that drive after a 30 day buffer time period. Someone people leave their drives always connected via a DAS to bypass this. See this thread for example – https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/1eeq6g3/is_personal_backup_still_the_best_deal/

    This is what prevented me from using Backblaze. NOt sure if this restrictions till holds.

    Reply
    • If you manually set the data retention to 1 year instead of 30 days, now a free option with the Backblaze $99 plan, you can leave a drive unplugged for up to 365 days before Backblaze purges that data. If you have files on an external drive in your closet, you should plug that drive in every month or two to ensure the disk is still readable. 365 days should be more than enough time for anyone to plug in a drive. If you aren’t testing your backups to ensure they are still functional backups, they may as well not exist.

      And the same goes for Backblaze’s backups. You should randomly select a few files monthly and restore them from Backblaze to ensure they are still working.

      A DAS is just a hard drive. Any USB or Thunderbolt drive you connect to your computer with a single cable is a DAS.

      Reply
      • I found the official docs page – https://www.backblaze.com/computer-backup/docs/external-hard-drives#af9epv you need to re-attach the drives every 30 days, else you many need to re-upload their data as per the “Note” section in “Unplugged or Failed External Hard Drives”. But yeah, you should be connecting the external drives at least once a month anyways to check their health and data stored on them. And if you have a desktop with internal drives, no problem at all!

        So yeah, it really works!

        Reply
        • “30 days may need to be re-uploaded.” The “may” is important. I don’t have time to go into it, but the guy who started Backblaze discussed this in great detail on Reddit. It’s usually not the case that it needs to be re-uploaded. It just needs to read every data block after reconnection.

          Regardless, if you have extended data retention turned on to 1-year, it won’t delete your data until the disk has been unplugged for 365 days.

          Reply
  3. Dan, Thank you for a great article. My only concern is with BackBlaze. Even though networks and internet are getting faster, this solution would prove virtually unworkable in the event of a catastrophic failure. It could take a year or more to download a massive collection of stills and video given the streaming caps and other restrictions. Even with Fibre its going to take a long time

    Black Blaze is fine if you only need to restore a handful of files but TB’s of stuff, cloud storage in general just isn’t practical.

    I can’t remember who it was but when cloud storage first came out years ago, you could pay a fee and send the service a disk with your collection to get started. Then if you needed your stuff back all at once, you could pay a fee and they would send it back on disk. This makes it practical. Downloading TB’s of stuff across the internet does not.

    Reply
    • “I can’t remember who it was but” Well, the answer is Backblaze. And they still offer this solution so what you describe is not a problem at all. They even refund you the cost of the drive if you send it back, so it’s literally a free option!

      See the “restore by mail” option here: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/features/restore#af9epv

      Also, even on my slow Yukon internet, it would only take a couple of months to recover my current Backblaze backup via a download. Realistically, I’d do it in batches, first pulling in the photos from the past year, which I need immediately, which would take a couple of days. Then, I’d work on everything else. I like my archive, but I don’t need all of it every day. If a client wanted a photo from ten years ago, it’d be no issue to go and cherry-pick that file. So I guess it depends how you work. I rarely need my older photos. If you need everything, always, right now, then use the mail option.

      Reply
  4. Great article. Question: When I go on a shoot that requires backpacking in the wilderness and so I won’t have electrical power, and I won’t take my computer, can I use a card reader and somehow connect it to a Crucial or other portable SSD HD to back up my photos? If not, is there something that you can recommend?

    Reply
    • The easiest way to deal with that when you don’t have a computer is to use a phone that has a USB-C connector then plug a USB-C hub into the phone and plug both the card reader and drive into the hub. To be honest, I don’t bother with that, though. If I’m in that situation, I shoot two cards simultaneously in my camera and don’t delete the cards until I’m back to civilization.

      Reply
  5. Excellent review…and as I’m about to outgrow my ThunderBay Mini a full size bay ThunderBay mini is in my future. A couple thoughts you might want to add. First…if you use your laptop besides on travel how do ypu back it up? I’ve found that Time Mavhine over the network is notoriously unreliable…but using CCC with Remote Macintosh as the destination rather than a mounted volume has been bulletproof for me for a couple years now. Second…how do you handle the catalog on travel…take the main one with you or use a travel one on the laptop and then export/import on return home?

    Reply
  6. Great article! But I have some questions.

    My journey from H$!! started after losing all camera gear and 5TB of photos from a Europe trip the night before returning to the USA. The Air BNB I had rented was burglarized (I believe by the owner). All camera gear and HARD DRIVES GONE! I vowed I would let this happen again. That was 45 days of photography GONE! So, I was convinced NAS was the way to go. After diving into the world of NAS and investing a WHOLE lot of $$$$$$ I found myself in a money pit situation. I bought the NAS, then the Hard drives, thinking I am doing the right thing. I Moved all the data I had from the 23 external hard drives to the NAS. GREAT!! I HAVE ALL THE DATA IN ONE PLACE AND IT’S USABLE! WHOA GHOST RIDE! There’s a WHOLE LOT MORE THAT GOES WITH the NAS! The first investment was over 6K.

    Then came the 3-2-1 back up. Will how do you back up 112TB of data? Not on external hard drives. You have to buy another NAS to back up the one you have. SOOOOOOOOO, I am putting out another 6K to back my NAS UP?!!!!!! NOW I HAVE TWO NAS! 6K$$$$$ Where do you put this second NAS?

    That’s just one back up. Remember, 3-2-1? So, I checked into online storage. Blaze, being the “best” I can find. But it’s STILL $100.00 a year. True, not a bad deal. How much have I invested in storage? 6K +6K+100 (per year) = 12K PLUS! NOW, try to find a place to put a second NAS with an internet connection to keep them updated. Family? Friends? Work? WHO and WHERE can you put this second NAS that will let you use their internet and power for free? Not for free? ADD THAT COST ONTO THE EQUATION!

    On, online storage for the third solution? So, I’ve invested 12K. TRUST ME, I DIDN’T HAVE the FIRST 6K to INVEST! After you start looking at the companies for online storage you are paying up the backside for it. BUT how many years can I use online storage / cloud service before I equal the 12K I’ve already spent? If I go to a cloud /storage I have web interface (I do with my NAS too) to upload photos when traveling as a backup. My data is backed up back the service provider. That equals a MINS in overall cost of data backup.

    HERE’S MY QUESTIONS:
    Why buy a NAS?
    Why backup to 3-2-1 if you use online storage?
    Why not just skip paying for all the “other” stuff and use online back up only. The companies now have to backup “their” severs to maintain YOUR data.
    If I am going to use an online data backup, why waste my money on the other NAS, Off site Backup and online service?

    I haven’t really found a TRUE answer to BACKING UP YOUR DATA. When I pose the question to an online form no one really wants the address the TRUTH about buying / owning a NAS.

    Reply

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