It’s Time To Backup Your Photos
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I can’t believe it’s December already! How many photos did you take this year? According to my phone, I have 2,533 photos from 2022. But I also took an amazing vacation to Uganda with my DSLR camera, and took another 4300+ (all that wildlife!). So we’ll say 7000 or so for me. I have cleaned out many of those Uganda photos, but not yet all. Even though there is still some clutter in my photos, I continue to backup regularly.
Backup now.
My biggest piece of advice to keep your photos safe? Back them up regularly and automatically. Done is better than perfect. Don’t wait until you have cleaned out the junk. Why? Because you may never clean out the junk, and you never know when the data gremlins will come and corrupt your computer, your files, your phone, anywhere you keep important things.
No one is immune to the data gremlins. I back up regularly, using multiple different methods, and still lost a document yesterday when our power went out for no apparent reason. Luckily it was only a few paragraphs - it could have been a whole lot worse.
The 3-2-1 Backup Rule:
The ideal backup for all of your important files, not just photos, is to follow the 3-2-1 backup rule:
3 copies
on 2 different media
with 1 off-site
Let’s pull this apart. Three copies is self-explanatory. Two different media - this means that you don’t want to have all three of your copies on the same hard drive. Instead, if you have one copy on your computer, you should have the additional copies on either an external drive(s) or on a cloud service(s) or both. Then take one of your two copies and keep it somewhere else. If your three copies are 1) your computer, 2) an external drive, and 3) another external drive, and your house burns down, poof - all are gone. But if copy #3 was on an external drive in your office, or on a cloud service, no problem.
Use an Automatic Backup
Now that we understand the 3-2-1 backup system, let’s take it one step further. The best kind of backup is the one that happens automatically. Manual backups just create a mess. Consider this scenario:
You just downloaded 4300+ photos from your camera to your computer after taking an epic trip. You leave the originals on the camera card “just in case.” (Confession, I do this all the time. I tend not to clean out that camera card until I need it for another big outing).
You then think, I want to make sure I have a second copy, so I’ll copy this whole folder to an external hard drive. (Yup, I used to do this).
Two months later, after you’ve done a lot of photo editing and culling, you think to yourself, I don’t want to lose all of those edits that have taken me months, so I’ll just make another copy and put it in OneDrive. (Yep, I used to do this too, thinking I was so smart and careful).
You get very busy with work, and don’t touch those photos for a while. Then you find yourself with some time and go back to make a book. But it’s been a while so you are not sure which copy is the most up to date. Is it the copy on your computer? On OneDrive? On the external hard drive? They are all different!!!
You now have 4 different copies in 4 different places that don’t match.
One of the thousands of photos I took in Uganda this summer. I love this photo, and would hate to lose it.
Before I wised up to the whole 3-2-1 backup system, and discovered automatic backups, this used to be me. Now I work with many many clients that operate this way - it’s why so many hire me to figure out their photo chaos, remove duplicates, and put in place an orderly photo system and backup plan. They are backing up (good) but creating chaos with their backups (bad).
Using an automatic backup system can remove the chaos. An automatic backup system is just that - it’s a system that either constantly scans your computer and drives to continually backup your files, or is on a schedule where it regularly copies over only what is new. Neither require you to manually make copies.
For my own photos (a combo from my camera phone and my big camera) this is what I do:
They all live in harmony on a small SSD portable drive (I have far too many to store on my computer hard drive).
I use Backblaze, which automatically and constantly scans my computer and all attached drives to backup all media onto the Backblaze cloud server. It will send me a message if there is an issue or it can’t backup for some reason.
I use SuperDuper, which scans my computer and all attached drives every night at 10pm and backs up my files to a large external drive sitting on my desk.
I also have a full copy of all of my photos on SmugMug so I can access them at any time from anywhere, and can easily share.
Why Backblaze and SuperDuper? Should catastrophe strike my office, Backblaze can send me a drive with all of my files. But if I did something dumb and just lost a subset, it’s faster to just copy the files back over from the SuperDuper copies on the external drive on my desk.
Backup vs Sync
One last point. It’s important to know the difference between backing up your photos and syncing your photos.
A true backup is one-way, meaning files only move in one direction from your primary location to another location. If I suddenly lose all my photos from my small SSD portable drive, I can recover them from Backblaze or my SuperDuper drive.
A sync means your files move in both directions - if you make an edit in one location that same edit will be made in all locations. This is a very important distinction! If you have an iPhone, and you delete a photo from it, that same photo will be deleted from your iCloud account, your Mac, your iPad, whatever iDevices you use. I often edit my photos on my iPad, then those changes show up on my small SSD portable drive. So while sync is handy for cleaning out photos and editing - it’s nice to be able to do that from anywhere - it is NOT handy if you lose all the photos on your iPhone thereby losing them from all iDevices.
So now’s the time - it doesn’t matter if you haven’t had a chance to clean out or organize your photos - back them up! You can always make a new backup after you’ve cleaned them out.
Questions? Leave them in the comments below. Would you like some help? Let’s chat. Want to know when I post more tips like these? Sign up for my newsletter.