Backing Up Your Digital Wedding Images

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So you received a CD with your high resolution images. Now what? Well the first thing you should do is make a backup of your images. Now, I will always have backups of all the weddings I photograph, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have one too.

There are many options when it comes to backing up your digital files. You can always buy external drives, burn additional CD’s, or use DVD’s which hold more data. And there’s the option of online backup services.

You can buy really inexpensive external drives these days. I would go out and get one or two of the small usb powered hard drives.  They are small enough that you can keep one in a home safe, deposit box, or store it at one of your parents homes.

Hard drives will fail. If you have a traditional hard drive, you know one with the spinning platters, it will eventually wear out and fail. They do now make solid state drives (SSD) that do not have this issue, but those are somewhat pricey still. So another option for you to look into is online storage. You may hear the buzz word “cloud” being used everywhere these days. What this means is you data is stored in multiple locations, duplicated across many storage drives, and sometimes in multiple locations. There are many companies out there that allow you to copy data from your computer to their data storage facilities for a small monthly fee. This is a great solution and one that I personally use to backup my photography work.

A few companies that offer online storage are:

Mozy | www.mozy.com

ADrive | www.adrive.com

Box.net | www.box.net

Backblaze | www.backblaze.com

MobileMe | www.me.com (Apple’s backup solution)

How I backup your wedding:

1. Memory cards are downloaded to a RAID drive.
2. High resolution JPG copies are created and uploaded to an online storage site.
3. DVD’s are created with the original files and stored.
4. Your proofs are uploaded to Pictage.com as high resolution files. These can also be retrieved when necessary.

Within 36 of your wedding, there are 4 copies of your photos, 2 which are safely stored offsite.