Photography Backup

Tutorials about photography backups and reviews of hard drives, RAID systems and SSDs for photographers.

The Mindset That’s Costing People Their Images: Digital Photography is NOT Free!!

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When it comes to protecting my huge archive of digital images I take absolutely no chances. My archive is stored on a Drobo which gives me some redundancy from drive failure. That Drobo is mirrored to a second Drobo which also has redundancy from drive failure, and then another copy of the same archive is stored off site on another Drobo. To lose my image archive I would basically need to have six simultaneous hard drive failures across two distinct geographic locations. Even then it would only take out the full archive which would leave me with copies of all …

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Cloud Backup for Photographers

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Regular readers of the site will know that I’m always hammering on about how important a good backup strategy is. Hard drives will fail, as sure as the sun will rise. It’s only a matter of time. When I get into backup discussions with other photographers, we always seem to end up on the same topic: Cloud backups. A solid backup strategy should always follow the 3-2-1 rule. 3 copies of every photo, 2 of which are local but on different drives, and at least 1 offsite copy. My current backup routine achieves this, but it’s the last step, the offsite …

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My Photo Backup Routine – Mid 2017

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I started this particular series of posts back in 2015 by detailing my photography backup routine and outlining some of the basic strategies for a safe and redundant backup system. If you’re uncertain about the basics, you should start with that post first. Time and time again I hear stories of people losing their precious images, and it’s not just amateur photographers either, I’m constantly reading about professionals running into trouble too and frankly they should know better. The biggest problem is that too many people still think of digital photography as being “free” because there are no film costs …

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Drobo Announced a New Thunderbolt 3 Unit and Here’s Why I’m Curious…

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If any of you have been keeping track of my semi-regular updates about my backup solution and general photo storage workflow, you may remember that my primary devices are currently Drobo 5Ds. My history with Drobo goes back to the very first generation Firewire products, and back then they were buggy and unreliable machines that caused me to write some less than flattering reviews. In recent years though, the company has undergone a change in management, and very clear steps have been made to improve the reliability of their machines. Aside from a recent power adapter failure on one of …

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Securely Erasing Your Photos Before Selling Hard Drives

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I recently did an upgrade of my backup hard drives, something that every photographer will end up doing at some point. I was left with a stack of drives on my desk which I’ll sell on Craigslist or through my local buy and sell forum. They all work perfectly so I’m sure someone will want to put them to use. There’s an important step to perform before you sell any computer or hard drive, though! Erase doesn’t really mean gone.. I’m sure that everyone takes a basic precaution when they sell a hard drive, and deletes all the files and folders …

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LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt Drive Review

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LaCie’s Rugged drives have been around for many years and this year they introduced a new variation that has a built-in Thunderbolt cable.  I’ve used Rugged drives my whole career and I needed a new drive so I picked one of these up before a recent kayaking/wildlife photography expedition.  The drive is available as both an SSD or a 5400rpm hard drive.  The SSD comes either as a 250GB or 500GB drive whilst the hard drive version ups that capacity to either 1TB or 2TB.  I often need a lot of disk space when I’m on the road so I …

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