Transcripts
1. Welcome to the Course!: Welcome to this
photography backup course. Thank you so much
for being here. My name is Meredith
Fontana and I'm a full time landscape
photographer and photography educator based
out of Denver, Colorado. If you are a photographer
that has ever felt the sinking feeling
of losing all of your photos due to a
hard drive failure, a computer crash, or an
accidental deletion. Then this course is for you. Permanently. Losing
all of your photos and memories can be devastating, especially if you are a
professional photographer who relies on your
images for income. This is something that
no photographer wants to think about until
it happens to them. And the unfortunate
reality is that all of your photos and digital
data is at risk of being permanently
lost and deleted unless you have a strong
photo backup system. Perhaps you've even
tried methods for backing up your photos
and maybe you've struggled with
uncertainty about which backup methods are best
suited for your needs. Or maybe you've found the
process overly complex, or Dante, not to worry. This course simplifies the
entire process of backing up your photos so that you'll have a complete workflow in
place that works for you. In this course, we will dive
into the tools, strategies, and techniques that
the pros use to create a robust
photography backup system. I will also walk you through my entire photography backup
workflow step by step. And I'll show you
the exact tools and methods that I use to ensure all of my photographs are protected from
unforeseen disasters. After completing this course, you'll have a solid
understanding of the best methods and strategies for backing up your photography, so that you never
have to worry about losing a single
image ever again. So if you are ready
to join me in learning how to back
up your photography, then I hope you join
me in this course. And I look forward to seeing you in the very first lesson.
2. Redundancy - The Key to Never Losing Your Photos: Welcome to the class Ill. I am so excited to have you here because by the
end of this course, you're going to learn
everything you need to know in order to
protect your photos from ever becoming permanently
lost, damaged, or deleted. Now this is a topic
that a lot of photographers overlook
or don't really want to think about until all of their photos or data get
permanently deleted. I know that you
probably spend a lot of time and money
going on trips, investing in camera
gear, taking classes. The worst thing you ever
want to happen is to have your precious treasured
photos permanently deleted. This course is all
about preventing that, teaching you how to prevent
that from happening. We're going to jump
right into one of the most important concepts in backing up your photography, and that is the
concept of redundancy. Now what exactly is redundancy? What it really means is
the practice of creating multiple copies of your photos in order to minimize the
risk of losing your data. To put it simply,
redundancy really means having backups
of your backups. It typically involves storing your photos on
multiple devices or storage locations
that there are always additional copies that you can recover if the original
copies get deleted. What that looks like is
having additional copies. Duplicate copies, say on your computer's hard drive
or an external hard drive, maybe multiple external hard
drives or a cloud service. This is pretty common to
upload your photos onto a cloud service like
Google Drive or Cloud, Dropbox, Amazon
services like that. We'll cover all of those later in this
course and give you the rundown on which options are best for uploading
to the cloud. Why is redundancy important? It's a boring topic, but why should you even
care about it at all? Well, as you might have guessed or as you might have already
have experience with, digital data is very fragile. You should always assume
that it's at risk of being destroyed or corrupted
at any point in time. This could look like your computer's internal
hard drive failing. You might have had an
unfortunate experience, I feel like most of us have, where our computer crashes and we lose all of our
data on our computer. Another potential threat to your data are natural disasters. For example, floods or fires. Here in Colorado, we have a major problem out west,
especially with wildfires. People who live out west, their homes are in danger of being destroyed by wildfires. And if you have all of your photography on
your home computer or external hard drives at home, you could potentially
lose all of your data, all of your photos if you are, God forbid, in any type
of natural disaster. You also have to
consider if you keep all of your data in
one place at home. If you ever get robbed, then you could have all
of your photography lost. If the robbery includes your computer or
external hard drive. Redundancy doesn't have
to be complicated. It can be as simple as having one copy of all of
your photos on say, your computer's hard drive
or an external hard drive, then backing all
of those photos up with duplicate copies on
an external hard drive, a second external hard drive, or onto a cloud service having two copies of every single
one of your photos. Implementing redundancy into your backup strategy
is really about adding layers of protection against these
potential disasters. If one backup fails, you have another backup or copy ready to step
in and save the day. You can think of it like having
a spare tire in your car. You hope to never need it. But if you do need it, you're going to be really
happy and grateful that you do have that spare tire. And the same goes for your data. The more copies you have, the
more redundancy you have, the less likely
you're going to have a catastrophic
permanent deletion of any of your photography. Now you might think that having just one backup is enough. Hopefully, most of
the time it is. But one backup isn't necessarily a foolproof solution that will almost guarantee your
photos will never be lost. Even with one backup, you can still potentially
lose all of your photos. Over the course of this course, we're going to cover all of the best methods and
strategies in order to implement redundancy into your photography
backup workflow. And I'm going to show you my
exact backup workflow step by step so that you can
follow along and implement this in your own workflow
and really guarantee that your photos will most likely never be
permanently destroyed. In the next lesson,
we're going to break down how you can implement redundancy into your workflow and some of the best
strategies to do so. I look forward to seeing you
there in the next lesson.
3. The 3-2-1 Rule: Welcome back to the class all. In this video, you're
going to learn about something called the 321 role, also called the 321 system
for backing up your data, including all of your
photography data. In the last lesson, we talked about
the importance of properly backing up and
storing your photos through something
called redundancy or making backups
of your backups. Ideally, implementing
redundancy into your backup workflow
should be done in a way that's as simple as possible. You don't want to have
to think too much about the steps you need to take to back
up your photography. Every time you come back from a trip and upload all of your
photos to your computer. You don't want to have
this complicated process to ensure that all of
these photos are going to be protected every single time you upload them into
say, light room. Let's look at what we're going to cover in
this lesson today. First, we're going to talk
about what the 321 rule is. We're going to break down
each part of the 321 rule, what the 32.1 actually mean. Then we're going to
discuss why this rule is so important and why
it's really the best way to ensure that even in the event of a catastrophic event where some of your data could be lost, you'll always have the ability to recover your photography. Let's jump right into
what the 321 rule is. What it really means is
that you should have at least three
copies of your data, three copies of each image. You should have all three of these copies on
different media types. We'll get into what that
means here in just a moment. The one in the 321 rule
means that one copy of your data should be off site either on a cloud or
at someone's house. And again, we'll cover what
that means in just a moment. The 321 rule is the most widely
recommended strategy for backing up all
types of data, including digital
photography files. It's become a standard practice among all kinds
of professionals, not just professional
photographers, but it's also used
by businesses, IT professionals and other
organizations that need to ensure that they have
a sufficient backup. So that if they ever
lose any of their data, which could be worth
millions of dollars, they can have available copies to step in and prevent
permanent data loss. The three to one rule can be attributed to a man
named Peter Crow. He's a photographer, but also an expert in digital
asset management. He's really like a
pioneer in this field, and he wrote the book on this stuff and on digital
asset management, which I've shown you here. And I'll provide a
link to this book, as well as a really great
interview with Peter Crow. You'd like to learn more about the best practices for storing
and managing your data. This is a really great
technical book to read if you want to nerd
out on that stuff. All right, let's break the 321 rule down into a
little bit more detail. First, you want to have at least three copies
of your photos. This is really the bare minimum. You can have more
copies than that. It's recommended. The more copies that you have, the less likely you'll have a permanent loss of
all of your data. But three copies is a great place to start
and we'll really ensure that the chances of you losing your photographs
is really, really low. You can add additional copies
as many as you'd like, 789. But just keep in mind that the more copies
that you create, the more you'll have to invest
in hardware and software to store all of those copies
that could be subscriptions, more hard drives,
things like that. All of these copies can be put on any type of media
that you choose. We'll get more into
the different options, all the best options that you have like an
external hard drive, your computer's hard drive, hardware and software like that. For the second part of the rule, you want to have your photos distributed on two
different types of media. This guards against
an event that would affect one type of media
but not the other. Say if you got in a flood, for some reason your computer
hard drive that you had, all of your photos
was protected, but all of your external hard
drives, they all crashed. Then you have at least some
variability in where you keep your photography in terms of the type of media
that they're stored. Again, this can be any two type of media that you'll choose. We'll jump into what those different media options
are in a feature lesson. Finally, the last part of the rule is to have
an off site backup. This is really important because if you keep all of
your data in one place, as we discussed in the
redundancy lesson, if there's a situation like a
natural disaster or you get robbed or something happens in the exact location where you store all of
your photography, then you will lose everything. It's really important to
have a one copy and at one location away from where you usually store
your photography. If you have all of your
external hard drives that you keep your backups
on at your home, then it would be wise to
put your photographs, upload them to either
a cloud service or store an external hard drive like I do at family
members house. Or you could also have a storage unit
somewhere that's say, 20, 30 miles from your house that's always safe and
protected away from your home. All right, so let's briefly go over what you've
learned in this lesson. So far, you've learned all about the 321 rule and how
it works and how it's a framework that you
can use to simplify and create your own backup
strategy and workflow. You've learned about
how it will help you incorporate redundancy
into your backup strategy. The importance of the
321 rule is that it emphasizes that you
should have your copies on different media types and in different locations
so that if there's ever a single point of failure in one of the different
locations or media types, that you always have a
copy somewhere else to step in and replace the
copy that was damaged. In the next few lessons, we're going to cover some of some of the best options
you have in terms of media storage types and
different cloud services that work best for backing
up all of your photography. I look forward to seeing you
in the next few lessons.
4. Backing Up Your Photos in the Field: In this video, you're
going to learn all about backing up your
photos in the field, which is an important step that most photographers
overlook, that you should always take
before you even get home from a photo shoot and start importing your photos onto
your personal computer. Even if you do have a
robust backup workflow that you use after you get home from a photo
shoot and you start importing and uploading your
photos onto your computer, say in light room, then perhaps
onto external hard drives or onto the cloud
or other options will discuss in the next lesson. There is still a chance that you can lose some or all
of your images if your memory card becomes corrupted while you're on the
road or out in the field. I personally, because I do so much wilderness
photography and I'm out in the wilderness
backpacking for days at a time. This is something
that I find extremely important because if I spend a lot of time,
energy, effort, and money going into a remote backcountry
wilderness area, and I only have one memory card in my camera that
gets destroyed, then I'm in a lot of trouble because each trip I add
value to my business, and I also work extremely hard to get images on these
backpacking trips, They're very physically intense, and the thought of losing
images while I'm on a trip, it could really be devastating. Let's talk about
how we can reduce the chance of this
ever happening to you. Most modern cameras these days, if you have a DSLR or
a mirror less camera, most cameras have two ports these days to hold two
separate memory cards. What you're looking
at here is my camera, this is a Nikon Z 72, and there's a port for a CF Express B memory card and there's also a
port for an SD card, which you're probably
familiar with. These SD cards are more fragile, they're more susceptible
to corruption. If you're only using an SD card, you are putting yourself at risk of losing your images while
you're out in the field. Now this card right here, the CF Express card, is a lot more durable. It's a lot more expensive, but the investment
is worth it to have more protection against losing my data while I'm out
on a backpacking trip. If you have a camera
that takes an QD card, that card is also more
durable and robust as well. I'd recommend if your camera takes an QD card or
a CF Express card, definitely invest in one of these cards if you can
to have a little bit of extra security protection for your images while you're
out in the field. What I do is I use both of these memory cards in these
ports at the same time. What you can do is you can
set your camera settings so that the images are
written on both cards. Now, the way these
settings are set will be a little bit different depending on the
camera that you have. I have a Nikon,
like I mentioned. If you have a Nikon, this
will look pretty similar. Most cameras have similar
menus and settings. If you have a Canon or a Fuji, it'll probably look something
like this in your menu, this is just the LCD screen
on the back of my camera. You'll have the primary slot
and the secondary slot. And you can select or tell your camera what you want
each of these slots to do. The first one, if I click on primary slot selection
on my camera, it takes you to this
menu right here. And you have the option to set which card you want to
be the primary card. I always have my CF Express
card set as my primary card. If you have an XQDcrd, you would want that to be set as the primary
card slot as well. And then the SD card
is the backup card. We'll set this card, have it selected as
the primary card. Then we can go back
into the settings and select the secondary
slot function. And that will take you to
this window right here. There's a few options here. You want to select backup. If you select overflow, what'll happen is
once you fill up your CF Express card
or your Q D card, when that fills up, then it will start putting your images
on the backup card. The SD card would
start to fill up, you wouldn't have
duplicate copies. The whole point of
this is to incorporate redundancy into
your field backup. You want to have
duplicate copies of your images on both cards. If one of these cards were to get corrupted or
to fail in the field, I'd always have a backup or a second copy to take its place. If your camera has
two card slots, I highly recommend that
you use two memory cards, and this will just
safeguard you against losing all of your images
while you're out on a trip. Especially if you're
a backpacker or do trips in remote areas or in different countries where if you lost your
images from that trip, it would just be really bad. I hope this helped you out. In the next lesson,
we'll start to cover the best options for backing
up your images at home. I look forward to seeing you
there in the next lesson.
5. The 4 Best Devices and Services to Backup Your Photos: In this video, you're
going to learn all about the best options for backing
up your photography at home. Now, when you get home from a photo shoot or a
photography trip, you should always immediately transfer and back
up the images on your memory card onto your computer's hard drive or another location
for safe storage. In this lesson,
we're going to cover the four best devices and services that most
photographers, including professional
photographers, use to back up their data. We will cover hard drives,
hard drive enclosures, network attached storage, or Nas for short cloud services. And finally, I'm
going to give you my recommendations
for which options are best for you given your specific
needs and circumstances. Because there's no
right or wrong option, it really just depends on what you do as a photographer
and what you need. Let's jump right
into hard drives, your first great option
for storing data. You're probably already
familiar with hard drives. You likely know that
there's a hard drive inside your computer and
you might already be using external hard drives to store data outside
of your computer. Essentially, what
hard drives are, they're just hardware
that stores digital data. This could be things
like photos, images. It could also be your music, it could be videos, even your computer's
operating system is stored on a hard drive. There are two main types of hard drives that I think
you should be aware of. You don't have to know the
techy details about them, but it's good to have a
general understanding of what your options are. You have hard disk drives, they're a little bit slower. It's an older technology, that also means that
they are cheaper. These are great when
you want to store lots of data that you don't
access frequently, if you have many, many
terabytes of data. Hard disk drives are
a great option to use where you can make
duplicate copies on a relatively cheap
hard drive and keep them stored away
for safe keeping. Solid state drives. They're commonly found in most modern computers because
they work pretty quickly, so they transfer
files very quickly. This also means that
they're more expensive. It's a relatively
newer technology even though they've been around for quite a few years now. But they're really most useful when you need to access
your data often. And you need to have access
to that data very quickly, so there is a time
and place to use solid state drives in
a backup workflow. And we'll get to that later
in this course when I walk you through my
photography back workflow, the exact system that I use. The other thing
about hard drives that I think you
should be aware of is that you have hard drives that can be
internal and external. Again, you might be aware of the differences
between these two, but I just want to
briefly cover them. Internal hard drives,
these are going to be the hard drives inside of your computer or the hard
drives that you plug into, say, a hard drive enclosure, which we'll discuss next. These need to be
housed in some type of protective casing in order
to operate properly. Typically, your computer's
internal hard drive is connected directly
to the motherboard, and it's not something that
you want to take out and remove unless you need to
permanently replace it. Then you have your external hard drives here on the right. These just plug directly
into your computer. You can think of them like an external storage unit where you keep all of your
digital files off and away from your
computer's hard drive. These also come in solid state drives
and hard disk drives. Now, I would highly recommend that if you choose to use
external hard drives, which I recommend that you do, that you keep all of your photography off of your computer's
internal hard drive. The reason for this is that the more data that you
fill up on your computer, at least I have noticed, the more space you fill up on
your computer's hard drive, the slower your computer
is going to work. It's going to bog it down. It's going to make
it difficult to use intensive programs like
Photoshop and Light Room, an Adobe Bridge and
Adobe Camera Raw. It's really going to
slow your computer down, especially if you get up to 80, 90% of the maximum
storage capacity memory of your computer's hard drive. For example, my computer's
internal hard drive is about 500 gigabytes. I want to keep my
storage 50% or less, or I want to make
sure that the data on my computer doesn't surpass
250 gigabytes of data. Really the goal is to keep 50% or more of the available memory on your computer's
hard drive open. And this will keep your
computer running optimally, but it also means that
you're going to have a very limited amount of
storage for your photography. I will show you in
the next lesson in my full photography
workflow how I ensure that all of my photos are never imported directly onto
my computer's hard drive. They always end up on
external hard drives, particularly the device I use
is a hard drive enclosure. This is very similar to
using external hard drives. This might be more new to you, if you're new to
backing up your photos. What a hard drive enclosure is. It's basically a box, and I'll provide a link to this exact hard drive
enclosure that I use. It's not the fanciest, it's relatively cheap,
but knock onwood, it hasn't failed me yet. It's been a great
hard drive enclosure. It's essentially a box that
stores multiple hard drives. This is what it looks like when you open this front
door right here. There's a front door and
you just pop this off and then you have these bays inside. You can see that there are these black little holes in the front of this
hard drive enclosure. You can't see all four. Just trust me, there's four of these bays in this enclosure. My hard drives fit into
each of these bays. I'll show you what that
looks like in just a moment. Then on the back,
you have a fan and a port can plug in
a USB 3.0 cord. This plugs into the
hard drive enclosure and this cord plugs
into your computer. Then there's also a power cord
that plugs in right here, because you have to turn
this device on if you want to operate it properly. The hard drives that you plug into this hard drive
enclosure look like this. They're a type of hard disk
drive called sta drive. You don't really have to
worry about what that means, but it's just the type of
drive that's compatible with the hard drive enclosure
in the system that I use. I have three of
these hard drives and three of them into
my hard drive enclosure. Again, I'll walk
you through step by step how this works
in the next lesson. But you can see these
little openings here. These D slide right in here. Then once you have
your drives docked in the base of this
hard drive enclosure, you turn the hard
drive enclosure on, there's a button right
here that will turn it on. And then you will see all of these hard drives appear
on your computer. What that looks like, if I just swing over to my desktop here, you can see that right now I have my hard drive
enclosure turned on. It's reading all of the disc. I have a main disc, a backup disc one and
a backup disc two. When I turn this unit on, my computer is reading
all three drives. The benefit to using this
type of device is that it makes it really easy to sync
multiple drives at once. If we're thinking
about redundancy, we want to have identical copies on multiple different drives. This enclosure makes it
really easy to do that. It also allows you to store
a lot of data externally. These particular hard
drives, the one that I use, is 4 terabytes, but
you can get them up to over 20 terabytes of data. That's a huge amount of data to have on a single hard drive. They're relatively cheap
when you get three of them. The bigger they are, the
more expensive they'll be. But you'll actually
be paying less per terabyte the larger
the hard drive is. So it really just depends
on how much data you have and how much you're
willing to spend. This one, I believe
costs around $100 and I'll provide a link to this particular
hard drive as well. It's worked really
well for me so far. The other thing that
is fantastic about this system is
that it allows you to swap out drives easily. If they become corrupted, say you have three drives docked in three
separate bays here, and the middle one
becomes corrupted, it breaks, it just
stops working. I can go buy a new
one, swap it out, replace it with the bad one, and then I can just sync
it with the other ones. There's a particular
software that I recommend. Again, I'll talk about this
in the next lesson that will allow you to really easily sync all of your
drives together. You could potentially have
multiple hard drives, external hard drives
that you plug in, but it gets very messy. I've found, especially
as you advance in your photography and you start collecting
more and more data, you have all these random
hard drives laying around different types of different brands and
different sizes. It becomes unmanageable
after a certain point. This is a very streamlined, easy system to use that keeps it simple and easy to keep
track of all of your data. Finally, this type of system where you have multiple
drives docked in hard drive enclosure is that it supports what are called
raid configurations. I don't want to go too much
into raid configurations here because most photography, most people aren't going to
need raid configurations. What it stands for is
redundant array of independent discs and
rate configurations involve more advanced
methods for creating data redundancy and protection
against disc failures. And I'll provide a link in the course resources
where you can learn about the different types of rate configurations and
how that all works. But it's really, if you want
to geek out on the tech, that would be something for you. If you want to keep it simple, then don't worry about it. You don't have to understand
raid configurations, especially at this point to have a successful backup system. Now the third great
option that you have the storage device called a Network Attached
storage, or Naz. This works very similarly to the hard drive enclosure
that we just looked at. You can see that
there are four bays. These except the same type of hard drive that we
just looked at here. The difference is
that this device connects to the network
or to a network, you can essentially create your own cloud with
all of your data. Which means that you can access your data from
anywhere and you can share it more easily among different people if
you'd like to do that. It's definitely a more
professional grade system than the hard drive enclosure. That doesn't necessarily
mean that you have to be a professional to
have it or that all professional photographers
have one of these. I personally do not use one. I use the hard drive enclosure because I found it to work, it's extremely
simple, and I just like to keep things as
simple as possible. And also these now systems
are much more expensive. So when I first started
backing up my data, I wanted a more
affordable solution. And I've been using it
for so many years now that it's worked so well that I just continue to
use that system. I've never really found
a need for a Naz system. Like I said, it accepts the
same type of hard drive. If you start out with the
hard drive enclosure and you decide that you want to
upgrade to the Na system, you can use your
same hard drives. You don't have to go and buy all new hard drives for your
Naz system, which is nice. The benefits of
using a As is that, like I mentioned, multiple users can use the As at the same time. You could have a friend
in another city who wants to potentially edit a
photo or download a video. Or maybe you have a
freelancer who needs some type of data that
you have stored on your, as they can access that from anywhere in the world that
has an Internet connection. You can also store, like the hard drive enclosure, you can store lots
of data externally. You can keep it off and safe of your personal
computer hard drive. You're not bogging down your personal computer and
taking up lots of data. These now systems can hold a tremendous amount of data
in the form of terabytes. Like I said, you
can access photos from anywhere that you want, which can be really
convenient if you spend most of your time
on the road and you don't really have
a home office or a base station where you do most of your
photography editing, where you need to have access to your photos remotely
most of the time. This system also supports
raid configurations. I would argue that it
makes it much more easy to incorporate into your backup
system because for example, enology who makes
this particular A system, offers software that allows that will create the
raid configurations for you. Again, I'm not going to go into too much detail about
how that works, but just know that that's
an available option that you can investigate if
you feel interested in a. Finally, let's cover
cloud services, your fourth best option for
backing up your photography. You're probably already familiar with what a cloud service is. You might already
be using one of the Cloud services that I have
listed on the screen here. Most people use these
services already to back up the data on
their phones or computers. Mostly photos, videos,
things like that automatically get synced
to a cloud service. For example, if you're
an iphone or a Mac user, you're probably already
syncing things to Cloud. Dropbox is a very popular one. Amazon Photos is one that I recently started transferring
all of my images to, and I'll explain that in
why in just a moment. But cloud services are
great because they allow multiple users like Na
system to collaborate. If you need to share
your data easily, cloud services make
that really easy. So if you're on the road a, if you're away from home and where you have most
of your data stored, then cloud service
will allow you to access your photography,
your raw files, all of your data from any location that has
an internet connection. This can be really
important if you live a lifestyle
where you don't work from a home office if you're
always out on the road. The other thing is
that you can store lots and lots of data
on a Cloud service. I'm actually not
sure if there is a limit to how much
data you can store. I'm sure each of
these different, the companies that
I have listed here, Amazon, Dropbox,
Cloud, Google Drive, and Backblaze, these are really the top five services
that I would recommend if you're
interested in backing up your
photos onto a cloud. I'm sure they all have
different rules and limits, but I'm not aware of a limit
in terms of the number of terabytes that you're limited to upload to these cloud services. Now they do work by charging you monthly and that
can really add up. Usually you're charged
for the amount of data that you have stored on that particular
cloud service. Usually, if you have
two to 5 terabytes of data stored on the cloud, you could be charged
ten bucks a month. If you have 15 terabytes
of data or 20, you might be charged 20
or 30 bucks a month. And that could just
keep going up, so you really pay by the
amount of data that you store. If you have lots
and lots of data, this can get really,
really expensive. And that's one of the
reasons I avoided using a cloud service
for a really long time. The other reason that
I avoided it is that you really do need a fast
internet connection. Or else it'll be painfully slow to upload terabytes and terabytes
of data onto the cloud. If you have patients and a
fast Internet connection, the cloud is a
great option if you don't mind paying the
monthly subscription. The other great thing about these services is that
they're very reliable. It's very unlikely that their
servers are going to crash. The way they work is
the data is stored in remote servers hosted on the Internet by these
different companies. It's very unlikely, but
they can get hacked. Anything can break,
employees can make mistakes. It's not a fail proof
way to store your data, so you never want to have all of your data just on the cloud. And again, that's why we use
the 321 rule and redundancy. We want to have
copies of our data, of our photography in
different locations and multiple copies
of the same images. Copies, duplicates of our
duplicates. All right. My recommendation in terms
of the best Cloud service, they are great.
They will all work. Dropbox, I would say
is really best if you want to share
your photography. But I would recommend, and I used Google Drive for a while. Many photographers,
professional photographers, recommend Backblaze, which
I've personally never tried. But it's become very popular
among photographers. Especially because if you
do lose all your data, they'll actually put
all of your raw files, all of your data, onto a hard
drive and mail it to you. So you don't have to spend hours and hours
downloading your data. If say, something happening, you lost all of your
backup hard drives. But what I am using right
now is Amazon Photos and I definitely recommend
Amazon Photos if you are a prime member. And the reason for that is because at least at the
time of this recording, they offer unlimited
photo storage. If you are a prime member, this can save you
a lot of money. I know a prime membership
is still a cost, but if you weigh it out and see how much
you would be spending, say to store ten, 20 terabytes or more
of data on Backblaze. It might be cheaper to even just get a Prime membership and then have all of your photos
uploaded to Amazon Prime. All right. So I know that that was a lot of information
and at this point, you might be a little bit
confused or overwhelmed wondering what is the best
option for me Or options. What I would recommend. I have this summarized
here so you can figure out
which category you really fit into based
on your needs and then which device or service I recommend would
probably be best for you. This first column here, this is actually what I use. I use a drive enclosure with three external three
sta drives plugged in. And this is a great option if you do most of your
editing from home, if you work alone. So you don't collaborate
with other photographers. I'm a landscape photographer, so most of my work
is done on my own. If you don't want to spend a
lot on your backup system, you're still going
to have to invest several hundred dollar into this system if you want to get the drive enclosure or
multiple external hard drives. If you want three Sta
drives like I have. Again, this is all going to be explained my system
in the next lesson. For example, the drive
enclosure that I have was about 100 bucks
and it works great. I haven't had any
issues with it. And if you want to save a little bit of
money but still have a professional caliber back
up system and workflow, then a drive enclosure with a few sta drives is going
to work great for you. Now if you want to upgrade and I say upgrade as you want the
most advanced technology, then I would say
upgrade to a, a system. And this works best if
you have a fast internet. If you do want to collaborate
with other photographers, you need freelancers to edit
things or share data with. You also want to have the budget to invest
in something like this. You'll definitely spend upwards
of $1,000 on a, a system, including all of the hard drives that you need to plug into your as the software. All of those things
really add up. You'll be spending a lot
more money for the Naz than you will for this
option right here. It is considered a more
professional system. But I also know that professionals do use this
system over here as well. So even if you are professional, don't feel like you
have to have a, a system and vice versa. Cloud service is great. I definitely recommend
cloud service if you have a fast
Internet connection, we need to collaborate
with other people. It also is a great way to satisfy the one in the 321 rule. So if you need to have a place where you keep all of
your data off site, and like I said earlier, you can also meet the
two in the 321 rule. It gives you some variability in the different media types that you use to store your data. So if you have all your
data just on hard drives, then you want to have a
different type of storage media. And that's where cloud service can step in and
be really useful. You do have to be okay with spending a monthly fee though. Again, that's a little bit of a downside to the cloud service, but considering how valuable
all of your photography likely is and how much time and money went into creating
all of your images, it's really a small
price to pay, really for all of these
different systems, all of the different
devices that we discussed in this lesson. It's really a small
price to pay to have a strong peace of
mind that you're not going to lose your photography. So in the next lesson, I'm going to walk you
through step by step, my exact photography
backup work flow. I'm going to show you
the exact devices I use, the exact software that I use, everything that I do in
order to back up my photos, and you can use the
system on your own. If you don't want to worry about figuring all of this
out on your own, just watch the next lesson
and copy what I do. Use that for yourself and you'll have a great backup system. That's it for now y'all I look forward to seeing you
in the next lesson.
6. My Complete Photo Backup Workflow: Hey y'all. In this video I'm going to walk you
through, step by step, the exact workflow that I use to back up all
of my photography. And this is a
system that follows the 321 role that you learned about earlier
in this course. If you use this
system for yourself, you can almost guarantee that all of your photographs
will be safe and protected from any type of catastrophic event like a flood, or a fire, or a hard drive
crash or anything like that. Let's jump right in
and take a look at an entire overview
of this workflow. I'll provide a link to
this photograph as well as a cheat sheet that walks you through each step
of this process. And this is just a
bird's eye view of what we're going to
discuss in this video. Let's run through this
really quickly and we'll break it down as we move
through this lesson. When I start, after I come
home from a photography hot, I take my memory card. Like I discussed before, I use two memory cards, a CF Express card and
a back an SD card. That's a backup
because my camera holds two memory card slots. I have one as a main card
and one as a backup. Usually, I just take the SD card because it plugs right
into my computer. The next thing I do is import all of those photos
into light room. Once I import into light room, I have my setting set in a way that when
they are imported, they are copied onto an external hard drive that I keep inside of a
drive enclosure. Once I have all of these copied onto this
first hard drive, the main drive, I use a software to sync it
to a second drive. This is the first backup drive. Now once I have the
second drive synced, I also have a system where
I have a third drive that I sync with the main drive that I keep at an
offsite location. This is the drive that
I keep away from home. If there's ever an
event that ruins these two drives that I keep in my personal
office at home, I always have this
third backup drive safe at any point in time. I always have three copies
of all of my photographs, a copy all copied on this drive, all copied on the backup drive, one and another copy of all of my photographs
on this back up drive to finally once I have all of these copies
on all three drives, I upload all of my
photography to the cloud. There are ways with
syncing with the cloud so that it automatically
runs in the background. Once you make a change to
one of your hard drives, your main hard drive,
all of the new changes, all of the new photos will
upload straight to the cloud. We'll break down this
entire workflow. It seems like a lot. But go to the link I put in the resources and you can print out this diagram
and follow along. We'll refer to this as we
move through this lesson. Now let's start with
the first step. The first thing
that I do when I'm ready to back up my
photos, when I come home, say from a trip or a day
of shooting photography, I'll plug my hard drive
enclosure into my computer. If you aren't familiar with what a hard
drive enclosure is, we discussed this earlier in the course on the
best backup options. If you didn't watch that lesson, definitely go back, review what a hard drive enclosure is. What you're seeing here is the hard drive enclosure
that I personally use. I will provide a link in the resources to this exact
hard drive enclosure. It's relatively cheap, it's much more affordable
than a Nas system. And the way it works,
just as a review, is the front door on this device opens up and
you have multiple bays. So four bays to insert
your hard drive. On the back, there is a
port where you can plug in a USB 3.0 cord, and I'll provide
a link as well in the resources to the
exact cord that I use. This makes the transfer from the hard drive to your
computer pretty quick so you don't have to wait
a super long time to view your photos when you're looking
at them on your computer. Now, when I have this
hard drive enclosure plugged into my computer, I always have at least two of these hard drives docked inside
the hard drive enclosure. At the moment, I have three, and I'll explain why
in just a moment. But you always want
to have at least 21 being the main
drive which I have plugged into the top dock
of this enclosure. And then The second one plugged into the second doc in the enclosure. Actually, you can't see all
four in this photograph, but there are 41 is up here in this particular
hard drive bay. I recommend when you're
just starting out, when you're just stepping into your first time using
this more advanced, more professional
backup workflow, that you get A enclosure or a N system that has
four of these bays. Again, I will provide a link to this exact hard
drive that I use. I use a four terabyte hard drive to back up all of my data. So you will need three
of these hard drives. It can get a little bit pricey, especially if you get hard
drives that are much larger. This particular hard drive, I believe it goes
up to 22 terabytes, You can get a 22
Terabyte version that wouldn't work for this
particular hard drive by. But if you needed
that much data, it's possible you
would need to get a different hard drive
enclosure that's a lot of data. Usually most people only
need about four to five. Then once you fill
up that hard drive, you can replace them
all with a new, fresh set of four
terabyte hard drives. So it's really up to you
if you're doing this for the first time and
say you have a total of six or 7 terabytes of data already that
you want to back up. I would start with
at least a ten terabyte external hard drive, or Sta drive to plug into
this hard drive enclosure. Then you can work from there. After you fill up
those hard drives, you can replace them with
whatever size you'd like. The second step in
this process is to plug in your memory card
into your computer. Very basic, like I mentioned, I plug in my SD card because my laptop has a SD card slot. It just makes it really easy. It's also nice because SD cards tend to be more
fragile and a little bit more susceptible to corruption because I also use
the CF Express card, this is the main
card that I use. The SD card being
the backup card. I can just leave this card inside of my camera right here. If this card, as I'm
doing the import process, if it gets corrupted, if it breaks, whatever happens, I always have a back
redundant backup on this memory card. This is a CF Express card and these are much more durable, a lot less susceptible
to corruption. Really great if you're
doing longer trips outdoors where you'll be encountering the elements
quite frequently. As landscape photographers, do you have this
durable backup copy always in your camera? Once this entire
process is complete, you can be pretty
safe knowing that you have a backup of
all of your new photos, at least that you just
came home with you. Plug this card into
your computer, and the next step is to import all of these images
into Lightroom Classic. If you haven't watched my entire course on
organization workflow, then I definitely recommend that you go and check that out. If you feel like you need to refresh some of your skills in organization
in light room, want to learn new
skills and want to learn a professional work. Float how to organize and import your photographs
into lightroom. Now the way I have
this import set up, I'm actually going to show
you right now this over here. Now, when I go to import
my photos into light room, if you're a light room user, you're likely pretty
familiar with this process when you
import photos, again, once your memory
card is plugged in, that memory card should
appear on this source panel. And I'm not going to go into too much detail here because I go in much more depth
in that course. I walk you through step by
step, the exact process, the exact import
process that I use, and I definitely recommend. But once you select your source, here it is right here,
going to find those photos. Again, these are grayed
out because I don't import suspected duplicates because I already have these
imported already. But what I usually
do is once I have my source selected
the SD memory card, I make sure this setting is
copy all of these photos. That they end up on
my main hard drive. This is the main drive
that I have plugged into my hard drive enclosure. Again, this is very
unfamiliar to you. Definitely go back, watch that light room organization
workflow course that will really help you out and
give you the background and framework for how this
entire process works. But essentially I'm making duplicates of all the
copies on my memory card. I'm copying those onto my main drive in my
hard drive enclosure. If we go back to this diagram, I'm taking these copies, these photos on
this memory card, importing them into light room, and they are copied onto
this first main drive. Okay, so let's cancel
out of this for you now. Once we have this import
done on light room, you will import those photos. They should appear in your
light room library and they should also appear
on your main drive. This is the fourth
step in the process. I want to check that all of
the photos have been copied onto this external hard drive that we discussed
earlier in this video. The way I can do that is I can go look at where I
keep all of my files. If we go into Finder on a
Mac, you're using a Mac. I'll look for where
my hard drives are. When I plug in my
hard drive enclosure, I'll see my main drive, or my main disc as
I have it named. I'll see my back,
my back up drive. Then I will also see my
second back up drive. All three of these hard
drives are plugged into my hard drive enclosure at
the same time right now, that's why I'm seeing all of these drives appear right here. If I go back to the diagram, those three drives
are this drive, this drive, and this drive. This drive right now,
at the moment is actually inside of
my drive enclosure. Just imagine this one is right inside this
little box right now. Okay, what I can do is click on the main drive and go into where I copied
all of my new files. If I open this up, I didn't
actually do the import, but I would go in here
and I would check to make sure that all of
those files that I imported onto my main drive
appear in this folder. This is the folder again, this is what I discuss in my light room
organization course. This is the folder where I
keep all of my raw files. These are untouched. I compile them all into a single folder to
keep them isolated. I don't edit them here, I just keep them stored
permanently without touching. They never get deleted, they never get lost. Nothing permanent
ever happens to them. I always have them safe and
isolated in this folder. Okay, let's say the files were successfully imported
into my main drive, into the raw files folder where I keep all
of my raw files. The next thing that I
do is I sync all of those files that I just
imported onto the main drive. I copy them onto
my backup drive. My first backup drive, we go back to this diagram, this is the step where
I copy all of the files on this drive onto
this backup drive. My first backup drive, the way I do that is
I use a software. This carbon copy cloner, which I have open up
here on my desktop. The way the software works
is it's very simple. All you do is you
select the source, the location that you want
to copy, all of your files, all of your photos
from the destination, the place that you
want to copy them to. Here I have the source
set as my main disk. The destination is my
first backup drive. If we go into Finder and
look at these drives again, what I'm doing here is I'm
copying all of the photos on this main disk onto my
first backup drive. That will happen
when I click Start. I have a similar task set
up in this panel here where all of the photos on my main disc will be copied
to the second drive. Again, in finder, the photos from my main disc here are going to be copied onto my second
back up drive right here. The way to create a new
task when you first download carbon copy cloner and you are setting
up your drives, your sources, and
your destinations. You'll click New
Task right here. All you do is select
the source first, and this dropdown will
give you a few options. It'll show you all of
the external drives, but you can also choose anything in a folder on your computer. If you want to
copy one folder to another folder on
your internal drive or to an external hard drive, you can do all of that here. There's a lot of different
uses that you can use. If you want to make a backup
of your internal hard drive, you can do that here as well. But I just use this particular
software just to copy my main drive onto
my first backup and my second backup that I
keep at an offsite location. The destination works the
same way you can select from this drop down wherever you'd
like the destination to be. Okay, that's the basic way
carbon copy Lunar works. It only works for a Mac
if you do have a PC. Another option that you have is a software called a Cronus,
I believe it's called. And I don't have any personal experience with this software, but from what I understand in speaking
with other photographers, it works exactly the same
way as carbon copy cloner. Carbon copy cloner is
a one time fee of, I think $50 You pay 50 bucks. You have that software for life, this software for PC. You have to pay about
the same amount, 50 bucks per year. It's definitely worth it. This is something that
will make it really a no brainer to sink your main drive to
your backup drive. Something to keep in
mind here is that if you ever make any changes
to your main disc, say if you delete some files, if you move, if you do anything that
changes the main disc, that will be reflected on your back up drive
when you do the sink. The other thing here is when
you first do this sink, if you have a lot of data, your main disk is say four
or 5 terabytes or more. And you do your first sink
onto your backup drive, it's going to take some time. It'll take at least a few hours, depending on the speed
of your computer. Just keep that in mind, That first initial
backup process is going to take
quite a lot of time, especially if you're doing
a cloud backup as well, which we'll get into
here in just a moment. Okay. I will provide links
to these softwares as well where you can go and
check them out, download them. Carbon copy Cloner has a great 30 day trial
so you can try it out, see how it works for
you before you buy it. Okay, The sixth step
in this process is to create an off
site hard drive backup. If we go back to
our diagram here, that is this drive right here. This is the drive that
I keep at a location away from my house where I
store these two hard drives. Now like I've mentioned, this drive at the
moment is plugged in to my hard drive enclosure. Right now, I have all three
of the drives plugged in. But typically, this drive always stays at an
offsite location, which is my mom's house. So she lives about 20 to
30 minutes from my house. I would recommend that
you have at least ten, 20 miles in between your house where you keep
your drive and the house, that you keep your
off site backup. Because if there's
ever an event like a fire or something that could destroy the location
that you're living, you don't want to have
your third backup at your neighbor's house that's in the same situation that could be affected
by the same catastrophe. I keep this second back
up at my mom's house. Again, that drive is right here. Now, what I do in
order to keep all three of my drives and sync
is about once a month. I will take this drive
from my mom's house. I'll bring it home and I will sync it back with
the main drive. In the meantime, over the
course of that month, I'll have photos that I'm
importing from photo shoots, from trips, things like that. My second hard drive is
constantly being updated, but this off site drive is not about once a
month, maybe more. I will go get this drive, bring it back home, and swap
it out with this drive. I could sync it while I'm home or I could just bring
that drive back to my mom's house and keep the drive I need
to sync at home. It doesn't really matter,
It's really up to you what system
that works best for you as long as you
make sure that all three of those drives
are getting synced. You don't want your latest
photography trip to be lost because both hard drives at home were destroyed or
crashed or whatever. And your third hard drive
was out at a friend or family's house and it didn't get updated with all of
your new trip photos. That's how your offsite
backup should work best. And that satisfies the one in the 321 rule when you need to keep all copies of your photos
and an offsite location. Do you remember from
the 321 rule that will satisfy the one
part of that rule? Lastly, this step I say is optional because
I didn't always used to do this and it's
not necessarily required, I think, in order to really
make a robust backup system. But it does add
redundancy and it does satisfy the two in the 321 rule. If you only have all your
photos on external hard drives, you need a second medium
to copy your photos on to, whether that's the
internal hard drive over your computer or
a cloud service, Like I mentioned
on the lesson on the best cloud
storage solutions, the storage service that
I use is Amazon Photos. And the reason for that is
because I'm a prime member and I didn't know this for a really long time,
really until recently. But prime members have
unlimited photo storage and that includes
all file types. Raw files are included in
that unlimited storage. I'm in the process of
transferring all of my raw files from Google Drive
onto Amazon Photos, which takes a long time, and especially if you don't
have a fast Internet speed. That's another
reason why this is an optional step is that it can be absolutely painfully slow to upload all of your raw
files onto the cloud, especially if you have many, many terabytes of
data to upload. So this is a process that
you'll want to be patient with, but it can definitely
be worth it, because you can access
your photos from anywhere with an
Internet connection. And it also gives
you another fail safe in case all of
your hard drives crash. Something catastrophic
happens to your data. Keeping in mind the
cloud service is not a completely fail safe place
to keep your photos as well. Again, that's why we want
different media types and different storage locations. Because clouds can get hacked, servers can fail,
things like that. It's not common and it's
not likely to happen, but it can happen. The other thing about
Amazon Photos and most cloud services offer this, but you can download an application which you can use to sync all of your
files onto the cloud. With this is much easier to do than to go onto the
website from your browser, Amazon Photos or Google Drive, or Dropbox, or however
you'd like to do it. They all typically
offer an application where you can your photos
from your desktop. This is how the Amazon
Photos app works. If you open this up, I open this up on my desktop. What you see here is that
there's a backups panel. When you click on this, you have the option to add a backup. You can choose any folder on any hard drive that you have
plugged into your computer. Here I have my main
disk and I want to have my all raw files folder backed up because this is where I keep all
of my raw files. This is where I want all of the photos to be
duplicated onto the cloud. I already have this
selected here right now I have it paused because this
is taking quite a while. Like I mentioned, I'm
transferring all of my data onto Google, Amazon photos from Google Drive. When I don't have my
hard drive plugged in, I just pause when
I plug it back in, I'll resume the upload. This will likely take
several more weeks, depending on how fast my
Internet wants to be. But yeah, this is a great way to manage how your files are
uploaded to the cloud. All right, so that's
about it for this video. I hope you learned a lot and I hope you got a lot out of this. But I know that it can be really overwhelming because we
covered a lot of information. And if this was all new to you, it might take some
time to sink in. So go back, rewatch this
video a few more times, and I promise that
you'll really start to internalize how
this system works. And I also, like I mentioned, I have my backup workflow
cheat sheet will be linked in the resources
and this diagram as well. So I hope this really
helps you out. And yeah, that's
it for now, guys. Take care and I hope to
see you back here soon.
7. Next Steps: Well, that's about it
for this course, y'all. I hope you enjoyed and got
value out of this class. And if you did, I highly encourage you to go
rate and review it. Also, don't forget to
complete the class project, which will give you a chance to practice everything that
you've learned here. If you enjoyed learning with me, then definitely go
check out some of my other courses on skill share, which are all aimed at helping you become a
better photographer. I also encourage
you to check out my website where I have tons of free landscape
photography guides and resources that will really
help you out as well. That's it for now,
y'all, I just want to thank you so much
again for being here and I hope
to see you in one of my classes back
here again soon. Take care and happy adventuring.
Meredith Fontana, Landscape photographer & educator
