Introduction:
People cherish their photos above many valuable assets. How should we protect the images that we take as photographers?
Note: Those of you who had the unfortunate experience of trying to view our blog on Tuesday and Wednesday and ran into a post by a person or persons who are "unhappy with their lot in life" and try to cause others grief. Our host server got Hacked. We had to delete the post history and backup the site. Fortunately, we had all published posts in another mirror site. We lost just a little and learnt something in the process. I assumed that our WP site was routinely backed up by our hosting people. It was not. I was informed that I had to do this myself. That is good information to know and do for all future events. We now backup remotely and locally on our Raid 1 file system daily. We also believed that we had the latest WP version (WP 3.3) which we did not but do now (WP 3.4). We will pay a bit more attention to updates from now on and immediately update.
Note: Raid is not the bug killer. It means: Redundant array of inexpensive disks. In other words, more than one hard drive.
How to Store Your Photos.
The simple method is to store all of them in more that one place. Hard drives have been known to die without notice. Even on a dead HD, the information can be recovered but at a high cost.
Recommended Backup Procedures: Masters-Tips
As a Microsoft Certified Database Administrator (MCDBA) we recommend the following:
1. Keep all information on a local Raid 1 system (Raid 1 is simply two HD's that have identical information written and stored dynamically on each drive. More important or rather larger systems can use Raid 5 or Raid 10 systems. Raid 5 simply means more than 3 HD's.
2. Backup your photos often and try to store them on more than 1 Computer.
Masters-Tip: DVD's can have a limited life span from 5-20 years. We give our customers their wedding photos on a special 100 year life Gold DVD. Expensive but look what is on it.
3. Make a DVD or CD of your photos and store an extra copy with family or friends.
4.HD's normally offer the most economical way of storing large amount of data today. You can connect a portable drive to your system to backup your valuable information and then disconnect it from your system.
5.Process your photos to smaller JPEG files of about 3-7 MB each. This will reduce file storage costs. Once you process the image, normally no need to store large Raw files.
6.Cull your photos. Duplicates, bad photos should be deleted.
7.Some people suggest storing your files in DNG format but these normally are much larger files.
8.Very few people come back years later and want prints done. Less than 1%; so having a policy of keeping these photos is simply costly. A typical wedding will have a file size of over 200 GB. After one year, we only keep the images that were on the DVD's as backup. This can reduce storage size by 98%.
Summary:
Well there you have some basic storage tips. You could add keep a copy of your valuables in a safety deposit box also. Flash drives are cheap today and can hold huge amounts of information.
With each person's wedding, we process first with DXO and then import to Lightroom. We start a separate Lightroom Cat. for each wedding. This can be backed up easily with the photos.
Do not neglect to backup your images. Make it a habit to do so. Our backup prevented our complete loss. A better backup would have saved a lot of work, but that has been taken care of. Remember to have a good Anti-virus software installed on your computers also.
Kirk is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and a Technical Trainer. He is also a Professional Wedding Photographer in Windsor Ontario In appreciation if you would be so kind as to give us a G+ and a Facebook Like KW Masters Photography on our Facebook page. You only have to do this once and add your likes and G+ per post. Thanks for dropping by.
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