All Your Eggs in One Basket

We all know they old saying “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, but diversifying your investment portfolio isn’t where you should stop with this advice.

Having a redundant back-up plan for all your computer data and photos is a must for any professional but should be done by anyone with valuable assets that they want to safeguard.

Family photos? Having those photos on facebook or the cloud is no guarantee that you are not going to lose them. But at least that is better than doing nothing. We probably all know someone that goes for months or years with only one copy of their precious photos – on their camera!

Here’s what I do to backup my photos:

I upload the files off my camera’s CF or SD card by the date taken but do not delete them from the card yet. Now I have two copies of the files.

I have two external 3 TB drives that back up my hard drives alternating every night. Even if I accidentally delete a file I can go to the external drive from the previous day and retrieve my file. When I leave town for an extended period I can grab a drive and I still have access to all my files. 

After this is done I can go back and clear my SD and CF cards.

When I have enough files ready, I go through the files and do a quick edit to get rid of the obvious culls; those out of focus, or those that are severely under or overexposed etc. I organize them into folders by date and make a new folder when I have enough to fill up a DVD. I then burn two exact DVD copies of each folder eg. “PICS103” with 4.3 GB of photos on each disc. I store one disc offsite in case of fire or flood. When I buy my next system, I will use Blu-Ray discs for their added capacity.  

After I burn my DVDs, I  move the files to a secondary slower hard drive that is still accessible through my computer system. This drive is also regularly backed up onto another external hard drive just in case.

As an extra safeguard I take my best photos and upload them to a free online storage service like Google Drive.

In the end, I should have  at least 4 copies of a photo so I can sleep at night without having to worry about losing my data. 1) on my hard drive 2) on my external backup drive 3 and 4) on my DVDs in two separate locations.

With digital data I can have all my eggs in one basket, but I have duplicated the basket several times and they reside in several different places. The mess that I had to deal with after this eggs in a basket photoshoot was a lot less painful and costly to clean up than a catastrophic data loss. Start your backup plan today!