Backup. Backup. Backup.

10 years ago I drove up to Kalispell, Montana, for a hunting convention. When I got there I grabbed a room at the least expensive motel I could find. I threw my things into the room which included a small clothes bag, toiletries and my computer bag. I ran across the street to the convention and returned to my room that evening to find the door was cracked open and my computer bag was GONE. The motel insisted that no one entered the room and that I must have left the door open. Later security footage showed someone entering the room with a key and leaving with my bag. I filed a police report and despite hours of arguments with the motel management, they wouldn’t do anything. They didn’t even refund me the $39 room. Losing a $800 computer to a thief sucks, but what’s worse is losing a hard drive with every image I had ever taken and NOT having a backup of those images. That was a hard lesson learned.

Whether it’s theft, a corrupt memory card, a failed hard drive or a house fire, backing up photos is a must! Losing personal images or shots for a paying client is unacceptable and easily preventable. Here’s 5 ways that I backup files and reduce my risk of losing them.

1) Make 2x copies on import to 2 different external hard drives. Then once I’ve imported and edited files, I’ll upload the best shots to my smug mug website thus creating a copy to the ‘cloud' AND then will create an off-site backup of all files. The offsite backup is crucial in case you lose all your hard drives from theft, vandalism, house fire, etc. In The Hunting Photographer Online Course, Zack and I show you exactly how we effectively and efficiently organize and manage our hundreds-of-thousands of photo assets.

My Step-by-Step File Management Process from THP Online Course

2) Many of today’s digital cameras have 2 memory card slots and you can chose how you’d like each slot to be utilized. You can set your slots to do a variety of things which include: 1) As soon as the first card gets filled up, the camera will automatically switch to the second slot. 2) write photos to one slot and video to another 3) Simultaneous write a copy of photo and video files to each card. I prefer option 3 so that I have two copies of my files in case a memory card gets damaged or goes corrupt. Personally, I have never had a memory card go bad but almost every photographer I know has had this happen and they’ve lost hundreds of images.

Steven Drake editing images in his pop-up camper.

3) As soon as I get back to my computer after a shoot, I immediately import and make 2 copies of the image files to external hard drives, then I separate those hard drives. If I’m flying, I’ll put one of those drives in my carry-on bag and another tucked away in my luggage. There are a number of memory card backup devices such as the Gnarbox that, in theory, are a great way to backup files in the field, but I’ve found them to be painfully slow and buggy.

Capturing the moon rise in British Columbia with an iPhone through a Swarovski spotting scope via a Phone Skope Adapter.

4) My iPhone is a valuable tool for capturing in-the-moment video clips and many of my clients use iPhone clips on their Instagram accounts. Just as I would with my Sony cameras, I also backup the media files on my phone by air dropping them to my computer then making 2x copies to hard drives.

The most important items in my pack

5) Lastly, the most important item in my back pack are my memory cards. It’s crucial that the content I capture on assignments doesn’t get lost or damaged. I keep all my memory cards in a 0915 Pelican Case then I attach that case to my backpack with some paracord so that I will never accidentally misplace the case and so that it can’t be easily removed from my backpack.

Making backups is a constant and is the most important part of my file management work flow. External hard drives are so inexpensive that there’s really no excuse to not make backups. Seagate and Western Digital make some great 2-4 TB hard drives that function well and that are inexpensive. If you’re looking for robust, reliable and fast hard drives, Lacie Rugged or G-Drives are a good option. If you want the fastest, lightest and most reliable check out Solid State Drives like the Samsung T5 Portable SSD or Sandisk Extreme Portable SSD.

-Steven