Backup Strategies for Wedding Photographers

 

If there is one service that wedding photographers should virtually never have to use, it’s data recovery. These are the companies that specialize in recovering files from a malfunctioning storage device, often utilizing specialized software and techniques, or in extreme cases also going so far as to disassemble the hardware and replace the controller board or other defective parts (which can get quite expensive). In addition to the cost, success rates vary wildly, with often only a partial recovery is possible, or no recovery at all.

I cringe whenever I see a wedding photographer post on social media groups asking for recommendations for data recovery services. It’s usually because they simply hadn’t gotten around to making backups, thought they had backed up but hadn’t, or that they mistakenly reformatted and reused a memory card a few days after the event but forgot to copy the images to their computer first, all very easily avoidable mistakes.

 

Dual Card Slots

I strongly recommend shooting with cameras that have dual card slots. This is a non-negotiable feature for any camera I use for documenting weddings or any other similarly crucial event.

With Canon and Nikon having introduced full-frame mirrorless camera bodies in 2018 that, to the shock of many professional photographers, only had one card slot (though dual-slot models have subsequently been released), a lot of heated debate has flared up over this issue, with the wedding photography community sharply divided into two camps.

One side believes that dual card slots are completely unnecessary, because they’ve personally never had an instance of lost images, and also citing the fact that before digital, film cameras had no such redundancy. I was shocked to learn that some photographers shoot with dual card slot cameras but don’t even bother using the second slot! The other side considers the lack of dual card slots in a camera to be an absolute deal-killer for professional event photography, because any readily available technological advantage that helps prevent image loss should be utilized.

I fall firmly into the latter category. Just because I’ve personally never been in a serious car crash, I still always wear my seatbelt and I appreciate that all modern vehicles have multiple airbags as well as other important safety features.

I did once (many years ago) have an instance where one of my CompactFlash memory cards in a Nikon D3s malfunctioned, corrupting the directory structure, and I was easily able to pull the files from the secondary card. It’s possible that recovery software or a recovery service could have salvaged most or all of the images from the malfunctioning card, but I’m glad I didn’t need to rely on that option.

But in addition to memory card malfunction, another possibly even more common culprit of image loss is simple human error or other human-caused circumstances. Probably the most frequent scenarios are when the cards are misplaced during or at the end of the wedding. The most heartbreaking (and cringeworthy) story I’ve heard was when a photographer set their card wallet on top of the car as they were packing up in the venue’s parking lot at the end of the night, and drove away without realizing they had left it up there. The card wallet fell off the top of the car onto the pavement. By the time they returned the next morning to retrace their steps, the cards had been run over multiple times by other vehicles and were physically destroyed beyond any hope of recovery.

Another example of easily avoidable image loss that we hear about on the news every now and then is when a photographer leaves their bag in their car, and this gear (along with the memory cards) is stolen, resulting in the couple’s irreplaceable photographs being lost forever.

Though memory cards should be treated with the utmost care, and not be left in the car or handled in a way that could lead to them being misplaced, we are all human and are capable of making mistakes. Shooting to dual cards offers significant protection in these scenarios.

Consider the prospect of what to do with your used memory cards at the end of the night. Most wedding photographers use some sort of case or wallet for safely and securely storing and carrying memory cards, but it’s a simple fact that any handling of the cards on-location (starting with simply removing them from the camera) increases the chances that they’ll be misplaced. After all, it’s much harder to lose a card when you don’t touch it at all, and when it has a big camera wrapped around it! But there’s also a distinct possibility that you and your camera gear could be separated (for instance, if you are robbed while walking back to your car, or your vehicle is burglarized during a stop on the way home) which would mean the cards would be gone too, which swings the argument back in favor of removing the cards from the cameras and keeping them on your person.

The perfect solution is to do both, which thankfully is easy and painless thanks to dual card slots. When I’m finished photographing a wedding, the cards are immediately separated before I leave the venue, with one set coming out and being placed in a card wallet (which stays in my front pocket and is tethered to a belt loop), while the other set remains in the cameras.

A perfect illustration of how dual card slots, along with proper handling, could have provided a substantial measure of insulation against human error came in mid-2019, when a Texas photographer shooting a destination wedding in Colorado somehow misplaced her memory card case containing all the photographs from the event she had captured that weekend. Apparently she was using single card slot cameras (or had a dual card slot camera but was only shooting to single cards). She didn’t realize the cards were missing until she was at the airport, ready to board the plane to head home, and because that day’s activities (sightseeing, hiking, etc.) and travel prep had included numerous stops across a wide area, the search area was huge. The card case having been left somewhere in the hotel room was also a distinct possibility, though she did call and hotel staff insisted it was not there. Although the story went viral and was highly publicized throughout the national media, prompting multiple adventurous people to volunteer to scour the areas she had visited in the hopes of miraculously finding the misplaced card wallet, to my knowledge it was never found.

Again, mistakes or misfortune can happen to anyone, no matter how much care is taken. And although this photographer may have been careless, it’s not particularly surprising that a small card wallet could be misplaced. However, it’s a harsh and unavoidable truth that had this event been captured to dual memory cards, with one set of cards remaining in the cameras afterward, and the other set remaining secured on her person, it’s extremely unlikely that both sets would have been lost simultaneously. Plus, although I do not typically travel for weddings, most destination wedding photographers that I know also bring a laptop computer and backup hard drive with them, to make additional copies of these precious images before leaving for home.

 

Label Your Cards

All of my memory cards have a label with my name and phone number, just in case, despite my precautions, a card happens to get misplaced somehow. I used to write this information on cards individually with a sharpie marker, but in addition to being tedious, it would wear off from being handled. But I now have switched to using small labels from a Dymo labeler.

These labels are automatically laminated as they are printed and come out of the machine, which helps protect them from being worn away. Indeed, after five years or so, all the labels on my cards are still perfectly legible.

Just be sure to keep an eye on how well the labels remain adhered to the cards, as if they start to peel away at some point, one could hypothetically come off inside the camera’s card slot.

 

Memory Card Handling Procedures

Make it an unbreakable habit that once you are back home you ALWAYS download the images from the cards right away. Yes, you are exhausted from a long day of shooting, and you just want to go to bed, but I have heard numerous stories of photographers plopping their cards on the desk (or even just leaving them in the cameras) intending to download the images later in the week, but then inadvertently erasing and shooting on these cards after rushing out the door for another session a few days later, having forgotten to copy off the previous job’s images. And as a side note, memory cards are not that expensive these days compared to 15 years ago (and SD cards are downright cheap!)… buy enough of them so that you don’t ever feel pressured to reuse them immediately!

Putting off the process of downloading your images for even just a day or two drastically increases the chances of a mishap like this occurring (dual card slots offer an additional layer of protection against this kind of mishandling, though you should not rely on this). It should also be noted that the longer you delay the downloading of your cards, the longer you go with insufficient backups (especially the essential off-site backup… what happens if your home or studio burns down or is burglarized?).

This doesn’t have to be painful or inconvenient. Just make the computer your first stop as soon as you get home. If you have multiple card readers, it takes just a minute to set up all of your cards to be downloading simultaneously while you go take a shower, grab a late-night snack, and get ready for bed. Come back to the computer afterward and this process will be done… start your backups, then go to sleep!

One other practice I employ is to retain one set of cards until after the wedding or portrait is fully edited and delivered. Years ago, memory cards were quite expensive, but these days they are very reasonably priced, and it’s cheap insurance to have enough cards on hand to enable you to stash away the second set of cards until you are certain they are no longer needed. I shoot RAW to both cards, and I specifically retain the second set of cards (not the ones that were originally copied to the computer), just in case there are instances of corrupt images on the first set that somehow went unnoticed initially. Retaining that same set of cards would offer limited benefit in that scenario.

I used to handle the retention of these cards by simply placing them loose in small plastic bin labeled as “hold until edited”. The problem with this is that once every few months or so, when I needed to free up some cards for reuse, I’d have to plug all of these cards in and check them to see if the images on them were for a wedding that had been completed and delivered (and so were eligible to be reused) or one that was still being edited (so they still needed to be retained). Seeking a better solution, I came across an SD card case with several dozen slots for holding cards (vertically).

This kind of arrangement simplifies things for me. Cards are added to this case starting from the right side. As a result, cards from the most recent wedding are placed working toward the leftmost slots, with older ones toward the right. Periodically, as this case fills up, I remove some of the cards from the rightmost slots, and I shift all the cards over to the right fill that space, with cards from the most current wedding being placed in the newly freed up slots on the left side. The older cards are moved to a plastic bin of cards that are ready for reuse. Because of the number of slots in the case, by the time a card has worked its way all the way across the case, at least a couple of months will typically have passed, which means the wedding has likely been completed and delivered, though I do confirm this before erasing and reusing.

To be fair, the protection from data loss that having dual card slots gives you is by no means absolute, as it’s still possible for an upstream glitch within the camera to affect an image before it’s written, leading to a corrupt file on both cards. There have been several reports of Canon bodies exhibiting this problem. I suppose it’s also hypothetically possible for a severe camera malfunction to damage the data that had previously been written to both cards, and there’s an extremely remote possibility that both cards could be defective or otherwise somehow suffer data loss simultaneously.

But I have a firm and absolute belief that the benefits dual card slot camera bodies give to photographers who capture priceless and unrepeatable events like weddings are far too valuable to disregard.

 

Backing Up Your Images & Lightroom Catalog File

Admittedly, I perhaps go a little overboard with my backups, but hard drives are not prohibitively expensive, and I want to do everything possible to avoid ever having to tell a couple that their wedding photographs have been lost. I’m Mac-based, and I use Carbon Copy Cloner to execute my backups. This app does a great job performing incremental backups, which means only new or modified files have to be copied. It’s also very fast at determining what needs to be backed up.

The way I have the app configured, it makes automatic nightly backups of my various drives to one large external hard drive, as well as automatic hourly backups of my computer’s internal SSD and my main working drive external SSD to secondary SSDs (with the purpose of this being an easy way to shift my work to a secondary computer if needed). In addition, I have a variety of manually-triggered backups configured (for backup drives that I keep disconnected when not actually running a backup).

The full backups of my internal SSD that Carbon Copy Cloner makes are compatible with apple’s Migration Assistant app, which allows for a quick and painless restoring to a new computer if needed.

If your backup method consists of one single external hard drive, especially one that stays connected to your computer at all times, you pretty much have no backup! A good example of this came from a post by a photographer several years ago in a Facebook group who asked for help recovering files from a damaged hard drive. She had been working from her laptop computer, with her only backup being a portable hard drive that was usually kept connected to it. When the computer got knocked to the floor by someone tripping over the power cord, both the computer’s hard drive and the backup drive were damaged by the impact.

It’s also possible that a power surge could damage all plugged-in devices in your home, and of course there’s the threat of ransomware. So, at a bare minimum, you need at least two local backups, and an additional backup that is stored off-site.

I have various drives that I perform automatic and manual general backups to.

• 14TB external Hard Drives (2) – these drives backup pretty much all my files. One of them is connected constantly, and the backup runs automatically late each night. The other is normally kept disconnected and is only run manually about once a month.
• 4TB Portable SSD – this small SSD backs up just my MacBook Pro’s internal SSD and my external 2TB SSD that serves as my main working drive. It’s normally kept disconnected, and I backup to it once or twice a week.
• 5TB Portable Hard Drive – this is a secondary backup of the external hard drive that stores all my prior final exported JPEG images as well as some other important files. Those files are backed up nightly to the above mentioned 14TB hard drive, and this portable hard drive is just updated manually as needed, as it’s the drive I take with me on vacations.
• BackBlaze – this is a cloud backup service that enables me to ensure I have a secure, off-site (and geographically-distant) backup of my wedding and portrait images and other important files. A small app runs in the background, automatically backing up new and modified files on a regular basis throughout the day. The app is designed to be very lightweight in terms of processor resources used, and I’ve never experienced a slowdown while it’s running.

I also have several separate drives as additional backups specifically for my wedding and portrait RAW files and Lightroom catalog:

• External 3TB Hard Drive – this networked drive (stashed away in a closet elsewhere in the house) remains always connected and available, which enables me to quickly and conveniently run a backup whenever I feel the need. But you should not rely exclusively on a backup drive that remains constantly connected, as the same lightning strike or other catastrophic power surge, or malware, that could wipe out your main storage drive would also likely take out this drive at the same time.
• Portable 1TB SSDs (2) – these two small SSDs are kept physically separated, and I alternate them periodically as they are updated (with one of them of these staying inside, the other remaining in my car). They stay disconnected from the computer unless I’m running a backup, to guard against the possibility of a lightning strike, power surge, or some other calamity taking out all plugged-in devices. At no point are both of these drives connected to my computer simultaneously. Up until late 2023, I used a couple of small portable hard drives for this function, which were fine. But switching over to portable SSDs was a quality-of-life improvement, speeding up these backups dramatically and removing the pain-point of waiting for a few thousand images to be backed up before I can head off to bed after a long wedding!
• 512GB USB Flash Drive – because a cloud backup of a big wedding can take a day or so to complete, I also keep a copy of my most recent wedding images on this flash drive, which I carry around with me if I have to leave the house before the cloud backup has finished.

Everyone has their own comfort level. But while two local backups in addition to a cloud backup is probably sufficient, it’s prudent to be extra cautious, since these images are so absolutely priceless to our clients.

 

Cloud Backup

It’s crucial to have an off-site backup, but for those of us who do not operate out of a separate office/studio space, this can be difficult. I partially fulfill this need with the above mentioned trio of portable hard drives (with one of them remaining in my car at all times, swapping between the three as needed) and flash drive. But these only qualify as off-site backups when I’m not home, so a cloud backup gives an extra layer of security, with a truly geographically-distant backup.

That being said, I would not feel comfortable relying solely on a cloud backup service as my only backup. A full restore of a large failed hard drive could take days or weeks to download (an alternative is to have the backup service ship you a hard drive loaded with your files). And although rare, I’ve heard stories of data center mishaps or problems with the client app that runs in the background on your computer, where backed-up files were somehow rendered completely or partially unrecoverable. So, use other multiple / redundant backup drives, and consider cloud backup to be your last resort in the case of a catastrophic loss of your primary storage and your local backups.

After being with CrashPlan for over seven years, I transitioned my online cloud backups to BackBlaze. Admittedly, it was a bit painful to start from scratch and upload all my data again (it took over three months!), but it’s something I had been considering for a year or two, and a few recent changes both at CrashPlan and at BackBlaze prompted me to make the move.

First, some words about CrashPlan. It’s reasonably priced ($10/month for unlimited backup), and it’s headline feature is indefinite deleted file retention. This actually changed in October 2021, with an announcement that deleted files would now be removed from the backup after 90 days. Why is this important? Consider the possibility that you inadvertently delete a file or a folder of files from your hard drive, but you don’t realize the mistake right away. With most online backup services, deleted files are permanently removed from the backup server after 30 – 60 days. So if you don’t happen to notice the missing files until 3-4 months later, you are out of luck, they are gone and cannot be recovered (unless you have a local backup, which you should). CrashPlan, on the other hand, will used to retain deleted files indefinitely. It can also be configured to retain multiple versions of files that have been modified over time.

It’s a similar story with how external hard drives are treated. BackBlaze and Carbonite both require that unmounted external hard drives periodically be reconnected and left mounted for a period of time so that the backup client app can see that these drives and the files they contain are still present. If this is not done, the backup of those files will be permanently deleted from the server. This is important for photographers who like to move older jobs to external drives that are typically not kept mounted and are instead placed up on a shelf until an old file happens to need to be retrieved.

It’s unclear as to what CrashPlan’s new 90 day retention policy means for unmounted hard drives – do you still have to plug them in once every 90 days in order for the system to not consider those files deleted?

All that being said, though there was considerable disappointment in CrashPlan’s announcement that it would be ending indefinite deleted file retention, it’s understandable from a business perspective. Yes, we as users want the highest level of service we can get, and having deleted files be retained forever is certainly attractive, but clearly this is unsustainable (at least without a substantial price increase), and at least their 90 day retention is better than BackBlaze’s standard 30 day retention. But when you consider that BackBlaze’s starting price is lower, it’s still a bit cheaper than CrashPlan when you add on the optional one year retention option.

At this point you’re probably wondering why I’m no longer using CrashPlan if it was so great. The biggest downside is its poor backup upload speed, which I was never really happy with. The upstream bandwidth of my cable internet connection at the time I used CrashPlan was 10 Mbit/s (my ISP has since upgraded me to 20 Mbit/s), but CrashPlan would typically only utilize about 1/4-1/3 of that, despite the settings being configured for maximum performance and full bandwidth utilization.

The reason for this poor performance was traced down to CrashPlan’s thorough (and otherwise useful) data deduplication feature, which analyzes blocks of data before they are sent to see if they already exist on the server (such as would be the case if a file had just been renamed, moved, or only part of it had been modified). This enables the app to only send the modified portion of the file rather than having to upload the entire file again. I encounter this scenario regularly, since I rename my RAW files to the couples’ names and a sequential number when editing is complete.

But this feature comes with a price, as CrashPlan’s implementation of process of comparing blocks of data on your hard drive with data stored on their servers drastically slows down the uploading of new files (which get no benefit from deduplication). This is a worthwhile tradeoff for normal everyday use, as data deduplication really is a useful feature, but when you’re uploading a big batch of newly captured RAW files, these particular files are not going to see any benefit from deduplication, and the time the system spends scrutinizing these files is wasted. In the past, CrashPlan included a setting where you could manually disable data deduplication for situations such as this. However, an app update a few years ago removed this setting.

 

So what was the final straw that prompted me to move to BackBlaze?

Well, two things actually. First, I had looked at BackBlaze before, but the 30 day file retention always made it a non-starter for me. But in October 2019, BackBlaze announced optional extended file retention and versioning feature. For an additional $2/month, deleted and modified files are retained for a year, and if you would like to retain files indefinitely, the cost is $2/month plus $0.005 per gigabyte of retained files (in other words, files that have been deleted or changed on your hard drive over a year ago, but retained in the backup). Though BackBlaze’s indefinite retention option could potentially be significantly more expensive than CrashPlan was (that is, before CrashPlan ended its unlimited file retention policy), one year of retention is an acceptable amount of time, and ends up being a little cheaper than CrashPlan, though price is not a significant factor, as both of these services are very affordable for what they provide.

The second shoe to drop was CrashPlan removing the ability to temporarily disable data deduplication, as this was the only way I could upload large batches of data in a reasonable amount of time. So it was really a deal-killer when they made this change. The possible reasons for this are understandable, as presumably they don’t want users (inadvertently or intentionally) permanently disabling deduplication and causing unnecessarily redundant upload and storage of gigabytes worth of files that could have been avoided with deduplication. A simple compromise would have been to give the option for users to temporarily disable deduplication (a “disable deduplication for 24 hours” button) when the user knows they’ll be uploading a large number of new files.

So, my files are now being backed up to BackBlaze, and it gloriously utilizes the full upstream bandwidth of my internet connection (though you do also have the option of throttling uploads if you don’t want it to use your full bandwidth, since this can have an adverse effect on the usability of the internet connection for the rest of the household).

Now, that’s not to say that there won’t be some aspects of CrashPlan that I won’t miss. If you use a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device and are a Mac, CrashPlan will (surprisingly) back up the data stored on it (at least that was true when I was with CrashPlan… I’m not sure if that’s still the case). Other online backup services either will not allow a networked drive to be backed up, or require a more expensive monthly plan to do so. This limitation is somewhat understandable though, as the ability to backup network volumes opens the door for abuse, where a user could be backing up an entire household or office of computers, all funneled through one machine with a single cloud backup account.

CrashPlan has a more robust data deduplication feature compared to BackBlaze. As mentioned before, with CrashPlan, when files change, only the portions that have been modified have to be uploaded to the server, not the entire files again. Similarly, if a file is renamed or moved, just that reference is changed, and the whole file does not need to be re-uploaded. This is beneficial if your workflow results in you renaming or moving your RAW files at some point after they have been initially backed up, and/or if you embed XMP metadata in your DNG files after your editing work is complete. Rather than these many gigabytes worth of files having to be uploaded again over the course of the next day or so just because the names changed, the backup completes in just a few minutes, because the app only has to upload the information that has changed. But again, this comes at a price, being much slower uploads of new data.

BackBlaze also has data deduplication, but it is not quite as thorough as CrashPlan. While it is effective for files that have been just moved and/or renamed (or have copies that exist in multiple places), it’s more likely to have to fully re-upload files that have been modified, even just embedding XML data. That’s because it gives files just a cursory glance to determine if they are duplicates, and apparently XML metadata is embedded at the beginning of the file, which causes BackBlaze to see it as a completely new file (as opposed to CrashPlan, which more thoroughly analyzes files block by block and only uploads changed blocks).

CrashPlan is also quite a bit more configurable in allowing you to designate how often various drives (or even just specific folders) are backed up, what takes priority, how many old versions to retain, etc. BackBlaze’s settings are much simpler (which may be a good thing for many people).

Still, I’m happy with the switch, as the tradeoffs were worth it for me. Also of importance, since my primary computer is now a laptop, BackBlaze is less resource-hungry than CrashPlan, quietly churning away in the background while using minimal CPU.

One thing to note is that unless you have a gigabit fiber connection with a fast upload speed, your initial backup will likely take quite some time to complete (depending, of course, on how much data you have stored). For me (with the ISP I had at the time), it was about a three month process. You don’t necessarily have to do anything special during this time, just let it run. But in my case, I had my own priorities as to certain folders that I wanted backed up first, and others that were less important and could be sent to the back of the line.

But more importantly, simply letting the initial backup run with no intervention would mean that wedding and portrait photographs added during the course of those several months may not have been backed up until that initial upload of existing files was completed and the app could then fall into a more regular mode of operation, just having to upload newly added and modified files.

The way I addressed this was to make heavy use of the exclusions feature, which lets the user specify certain folders and drives that they don’t want backed up. So, I started out with most of my folders added to the exclusions list. I knew my connection could upload about 200gb per day, so each day I would remove a batch of folders from the exclusion list that totaled approximately that size, enabling newer files to have a chance to be uploaded along with the older files.

But since having completed that process, I’ve just let BackBlaze run unattended.

 

Important Note for Lightroom Classic Users

If you work in Lightroom Classic, one important thing to be aware of with BackBlaze is that large files (defined as bigger than 100mb) are not backed up more often than once approximately every two days. In other words, if you have a large file that was backed up on a Monday, and you work on that file throughout the day or two, all of those revisions will not be backed up. Only after two days since the last backup of that file have passed (so, Wednesday in this example) will the file be backed up again.

Why? The stated purpose of this limitation at least somewhat makes sense. If you have a large file that is repeatedly being modified, re-uploading repeatedly throughout the day would consume a lot of your upstream bandwidth (though it’s possible that deduplication would reduce the actual amount of data that needed to be transferred). I would prefer for this to be a user-configurable setting, but it’s not a deal-killer.

The most significant impact this would have on me is with my Lightroom catalog file… if the file had just been backed up, then I spent an entire day or two editing a 2000-photo wedding, I wouldn’t be too happy if my SSD failed suddenly and my updated catalog file had not been backed up because two full days had not yet passed. Granted, this scenario is extraordinarily unlikely for me, because I maintain multiple local backups… recovering files from BackBlaze is my option of last resort, and if it has come to that, it likely means something really catastrophic has happened, and losing a day or two of editing work would be the least of my concerns.

But still, there is an easy workaround. Lightroom Classic has an option to automatically prompt you to locally backup your catalog file upon quitting (preferably on a different drive), with various intervals (once a month, once a week, or once a day) being options, or you can set it to do this every time you quit the app. That’s how I have mine set. So, every time I quit Lightroom, it prompts me to backup the catalog file, which saves a ZIP-compressed copy of the catalog to a specified location (it remembers the last-used location, so you don’t need to select this every time), with each backup being stored in a folder named with the date and time.

Because each of these backups is a new file, the two-day limitation does not apply, and each of them will be backed up. The compressed files are only about 150-200mb each, so as long as you have a reasonably fast internet connection, this will not have a significant impact on your upstream bandwidth. The only thing you need to remember to do is periodically clean out this folder by deleting older backups (otherwise, they will just build up perpetually). There’s a Lightroom plugin called Lightroom Backup Cleaner that can automatically delete these older backups, but it has not been updated in quite some time, and I was unable to get it to work in the current version of Lightroom. So, I just manually clean out this folder once a month or so.

 

And a note for Lightroom (Desktop) users

If you use the non-Classic (“desktop”) Lightroom app, there’s one other thing of importance to note, specifically if you work with DNG files. In 2025, Adobe expanded the ability of this app to work on folders of locally-stored images (rather than just in the cloud). But because there is no catalog file like in Lightroom Classic, edits are stored differently. For RAW files, edits are stored within XMP sidecar files. These are small files stored in the same folder as your images. No problem there, any edits you make will be stored in these small files, and will be backed up.

But if your workflow involves converting your RAW files to DNGs, there’s an issue. Edits are stored within the DNG files themselves, rather than separately in sidecar files. At first glance, this might seem preferable, but it’s not (at least not in the context of managing backups). To illustrate, let’s say you have a 40gb folder of DNG files from a wedding you just shot. These images will be backed up. With Lightroom Classic, that’s the end of it, these DNG files never need to be backed up again (even if they are renamed, they’ll just be deduplicated). But with Lightroom, any time you make edits, the DNG file will need to be backed up in full again, because Backblaze’s deduplication is ineffective for this type of change (apparently this kind of metadata is embedded to the beginning of the file, and Backblaze abandons the attempt to deduplicate the file when it sees this difference).

So, in other words, your 40gb folder of images will be backed up initially, and then if you go through and edit all those images, the entire 40gb will be backed up again. Go through the images one last time for some final tweaks, and it’s another 40gb backed up. If you have a fast upload speed, this might not be that big of a deal to you, but it’s just something to be aware of.

But this will also wreak havoc with your local backups.

 

RAID is Not a Backup!

I cringe when I hear someone say, “I store my files on a RAID system/DROBO, so I don’t need to worry about backups.” A RAID is a group of drives (usually housed together in a multi-bay enclosure), configured to work together in one of several different ways.

One way a RAID can be configured is for maximum performance (with the data striped across multiple drives). The speed of this type of RAID makes it attractive to high-end video editing, but if any of those individual drives fail, ALL the data in the entire array is lost. Most (hopefully all) of these users understand this, and have have appropriate backup and redundancy systems in place.

What’s more of a gray area for some photographers is when they have a RAID set up with some form of inherent redundancy, where the array can withstand the failure of one (or sometimes multiple) drives without losing any data, and this can sometimes be misinterpreted as taking the place of a local backup. This is most certainly not the case, as a RAID offers no protection against file corruption, or inadvertent deletion. Additionally, a catastrophic event such as a lightning strike or power surge would likely take out all the drives simultaneously, as could a hardware malfunction of the RAID enclosure.

So if it’s not a backup, why would anyone bother with a RAID? Depending on the configuration, it can be useful for those who absolutely need the best possible performance (with a striped RAID), or with a mirrored or otherwise redundant RAID, those enterprises that cannot afford even a few hours of disruption and down-time that a normal failed hard drive would cause.

But for the rest of us, I believe RAID is not helpful enough to outweigh the potential cons, though to be fair, my thinking on this is skewed by the fact that I used to utilize a NAS (network attached storage) RAID, configured for redundancy, and the power supply in the enclosure failed. I replaced it, only to discover that the failed power supply had corrupted the data on all the drives, leaving me no other option but to reformat the array. Of course, I had backups, but it was a time-consuming hassle to get the NAS back operational again and reload all my data back onto it. Because of that, I rely on a simpler setup of individual hard drives and SSDs now for storage.

Another thing that makes RAID less relevant now is the available size of individual hard drives now. Some users like (or need) to have one large bucket of storage space, and back in the days of 500GB – 1TB drives being the largest available, it was nice to be able to combine four to six (or more) of these in a RAID enclosure, and have them combined into a single large volume. But today, with massive (in storage space, not in physical size) hard drives as big as 18TB readily available, this is no longer as important of a factor as it once was.

 

Verify Your Backups

You should also periodically verify that your backups are indeed taking place as expected and not just assume it’s working.

Several years ago there was an incident here in New Orleans where a courthouse server crashed, resulting in the loss of decades worth of real estate transactions and documents. When IT staff attempted to recover the data from their backup system, they discovered that, unbeknownst to them, it had actually ceased functioning properly about a year prior, and contained very little useful data. With a lot of work, they were eventually able to recover and reconstruct most of the data through other means, but it’s a frightening example of what can happen when you take it for granted that these systems are functioning properly.

Similarly, during production of the Pixar movie Toy Story 2, an animator, while performing routine housekeeping tasks on the studio’s server, entered a maintenance command incorrectly and mistakenly deleted about 90% of the film’s 3D modeling asset files, and the backup system was subsequently found to have quietly failed at some point in the past, leaving the project in peril. Fortunately, an employee who had been working from home happened to have copies of most of the lost files on her own computer.

The lesson of these stories is, in addition to verifying that your backups are working, to maintain multiple backup methods and devices as an extra measure of safety.

 

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