You Need a DAM Backup Plan
The most valuable assets in our business are not our cameras, our lenses, expensive lighting systems, or even our medium format digital backs because we all have one of those right. No, the most valuable assets in our business are our images, our digital assets. We need to protect them at all costs.
Today, I’m going to talk about backing up your photos and creating a Digital Asset Management system that automatically backs up all of your files. I’ll also touch on how you can build a great backup system without having to spend thousands of dollars.
We’ve probably all had hard drives fail on us. I’ve lost multiple drives in the past couple of decades. It sucks. Luckily that all happened before I started backing everything up in multiple places. That’s not to say I haven’t lost files, I have, and that’s due to my own mistakes in setting things up, but I was also able to recover some of the files, so all was not lost. Data recovery is crazy expensive, so let’s set ourselves up for never having to use a data recovery service, and for a lot less than data recovery would cost.
Digital Asset Life Cycle
The way I look at digital asset management is that our files go through three different stages in their life cycle.
Live Files — When images are being created during a shoot and are still in your camera, I refer to them as “live.”
Working Files — These are all the files that you are currently working on, whether going through post-production on your computer or having just left the shoot. They are not in your camera, and they are not yet delivered to your client or moved to your archive.
Archives — You are done with these files. They have been delivered to your client and you are not likely to touch them again for a while, except to do reprints or re-edits, assemble a collection for a show, or restructure your portfolio.
Let’s start atthe beginning of a file’s life — in the camera.
Use a Camera with Dual Card Slots
It’s not often that SD cards get corrupted, and when they do, it’s often due to bad card management or photographers using low-quality cards. Always use high-quality SD cards and format your cards in the camera before every shoot. If you cannot afford a camera body that has dual card slots, that’s okay. Don’t get discouraged. Most of us start there and some of us are still there.
If you are using a dual-card camera body, swap the cards out at the same time, swap out your cards at overlapping intervals, instead of both at the same time. This creates an offset of images in case something happens to both cards. Incredibly low chance of that happening, like one in I-don’t-know-how-many millions, but why take the risk? When the shoot is finished, make sure cards leave the set with two different people in different vehicles and go to different destinations. Don’t delete or reformat the cards until the images exist in three places.
If you have a single card slot in your camera body, you need an alternate working solution. My recommendation is to use multiple cards and swap them out often. That way, if a card fails, or gets ruined or lost, you will only lose a small portion of the shoot and not the entire job. If you can backup your SD cards onsite, do that. If not, at least you’ve minimized your risk by spreading your shoot across multiple cards.
If you are shooting a wedding with a single-slot camera, you could borrow a camera with two slots from a colleague, or rent one and makes sure you account for that expense in your pricing. If you can’t do either of those, make sure you and your second shooter are never swapping out cards at the same time, so you’ll never lose coverage. If you don’t have a second shooter, maybe you live in a place where there aren’t a lot of photographers, get a good cardholder and multiple cards. If you have to spread an entire shoot out over 10 cards, that’s better than having all those images on a single card that ends up with an unrecoverable failure.
How to Store Your Working Files
For your working files you want to create a system of redundant storage. You can do this in multiple ways but here’s how I do it, and it’s the system I recommend to everyone when I discuss backing up your work.
Real Time Online Backup
I have a dedicated hard drive in my computer for online storage. I have 2TB of online storage through Google Drive and a 2TB internal drive to match. That drive is dedicated to syncing to my Google Drive account. Everything that’s on that drive is backed up and synced to the cloud in real time.
I have a folder on that drive for my working files that holds about six months’ worth of sessions. Those are all backed up and synced to Google Drive. If I make adjustments to the Capture One session, it’s backed up. I used sidecar XML files for metadata and those are backed up in real time.
If you’re on a Mac, you may not have 2TB of storage, but just make sure you’re using a real-time online backup like Google Drive or Dropbox, and dedicate some space in that drive folder for your working files.
If you work across multiple systems, such as a laptop at home and a desktop at the studio, you don’t have to transport your files if they are syncing in real time. As long as the other computer is on, the files will be synced across all systems and you can take your work home with you if you need to.
Nightly Local Backups
In my tower, I also have a large 12TB internal drive. I have a nightly backup scheduled to that second drive in case my working drive fails. I use a Seagate 12TB Baracuda Pro drive for this, and it’s big enough that it holds all of the shoots that I’ve ever done.
Every shoot I’ve ever done is on one internal drive in my desktop computer tower, so I can access any shoot without digging through one of my many external drives.
So, at this stage my working files currently exist in four places:
On the SD cards from the shoot;
On working hard drive inside my desktop computer;
Online in my Google Drive account; and,
On a second hard drive inside my desktop computer.
So, that brings us to archived files.
How to Store Your Image Archive
I bought that 12TB internal drive when I was considering getting a NAS RAID system. NAS stands for Network-Attached Storage and RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. I had my eye on the Synology NAS with 4 drive bays and I realized it was starting to get expensive with the cost of the enclosure and four large drives designed for NAS systems.
A RAID drive allows for redundancy of files, so if one drive dies, you don’t lose everything. Every files is stored redundantly across the array of drives and you just need to drop ni a new drive and the whole system will repair itself. In basic terms. The real advantage is that all your files are in one place and safe from pretty much everything except fire and theft.
So, instead of dropping $2000+ into a RAID system, I opted for the 12TB Seagate Baracuda Pro for a little over $400. The advantage it gave me was being able to store all my images in one place, and it also allowed me to add an extra step of redundancy to my Digital Asset Management, basically exactly what a NAS system does. The advantage of the internal drive is that it’s actually faster than a NAS system and doesn’t rely on network connectivity. It’s attached directly to the motherboard.
If you’re on a Mac, you don’t really have the option of adding internal storage, so you could opt for NAS system, or get anexternal drive enclosure that connects through USB 3.0. But do your homework first to make sure it plays well with Macs.
The files on my internal archive are backed up in two places: offline on the external USB hard drives I used to have connected to my computer, and online through Backblaze and Amazon.
Long-Term Offline Storage
Before I bought the Seagate drive, I used to keep all my archives on external Western Digital Passport drives, organized by year. Now, those drives act as cold storage for my archives and sit in a drawer beside my desk in case the internal drive ever fails.
I only have one external drive attached to my computer for photos now, and I back it up manually when I migrate shoots from the working drive to the archive, since I know everything in my archive will also be backed up online in two places.
Long-Term Online Storage
First, my entire archive is backed up online automatically with Backblaze. Backblaze is $60 USD a month for a personal account and comes with unlimited storage. It’s amazing and should be the primary method with which you store your archive. Your files are redundantly stored across their network and completely safe from fire or physical theft.
And finally, the secret sauce in my whole system is Amazon Prime. Every Amazon Prime account comes with unlimited photo storage at the original size. That includes JPEGs, TIFF files, PSDs, and even raw files. All of that is included, unlimited, with your Amazon Prime account. So not only do you get free next-day delivery from Amazon, Amazon Prime TV and movies, you get unlimited online digital storage of all your images.
So, if money is tight, you’re just starting out, and can’t afford Backblaze, get an Amazon Prime account and use it. You’ll also get the other benefits that come along with it. If you can afford $60 for the year, get Backblaze now and start the backup process right away. It’ll work in the background keeping your files safe.
A Final Note
With storage being so cheap now, and your external archive being unlimited in size, there is no reason to delete old shoots or even unedited files. This is a practice I’ve never understood. I can’t even count the times I’ve gone back into an old shoot and realized I had much better photos in there than I had previously processed.
I’m a better photographer now, I’m not caught up on technical perfection, and I see different things in old photos that I didn’t see before. My eye and my voice have matured. Don’t eliminate the possibility of your future self discovering how great of a photographer you really were back when you thought you really weren’t.
