Everyone has lost photos before. Maybe you deleted them off your phone or the computer locked up and you had the original file with no copies on your desktop. We are lucky that it is SO easy to make a digital copy of our image files yet most people don’t have a system in place for backing up.

In our backup system, it is important to have a central location for your originals or an Archive. This should be your first step in creating a system. From there, it will depend upon how much data you need to back up and what your offsite system will be.

1. Create a backup of your Archive on a portable drive that can be taken off site. This should go to a different building with a trustworthy person or yourself. Create a schedule for bringing in the drive and backing it up. We do it monthly and also backup our other company files at the same time.
2. The cloud can be great for all of the images you are taking on mobile devices. Set it up to backup automatically but also create a schedule for putting these mobile images into your system for renaming and backing up…in case, you know, you don’t pay your bill or a gamma ray hits the earth.
3. Don’t forget to back up any images you have done multiple edits to, these can be kept in a separate drive or server in your location. We backup images that have been delivered to clients so if they want that great image we did tons of work on, we will always have it.

We learned the hard way when our archive drive in the office failed. Luckily, we had been backing up to several locations over the years. We were able to rebuild the drive with no images lost. But it was a long week!