This is an explanation of my current back up workflow and what I will change after completing Meridith's course.

Photo Backup Workflow Assignment - Merideth Fontana Course

 

I am a semi professional Landscape and Nature photographer. I sell photo prints and framed photos at a monthly market in my town. I have started doing Pet Photography although this is in the very early stages and I am hoping to expand this. I am retired from work and so I don’t require a main income which helps a lot.

My back up workflow system

I currently have 2 external SSD drives attached to my computer. One is the main drive and the other is a back up drive. I also have Backblaze to save all of my raw files in the cloud. I used to have a separate external drive stored off site but have stopped this once I got my Backblaze cloud account.

Back up workflow:

• I take my SD or CF express card from my Nikon Z62 camera and plug it into my laptop or PC with a card reader.
• I then use Photo Mechanic software to sort through the photos so that I only have ones in focus tagged. I assign meta data to each photo and then ingest them into a Raw file folder in a main external SDD drive. I use Photo Mechanic because it is quicker than Lightroom and is great for assigning a range of metadata.
• I then import the raw files into Lightroom and add them rather than copy them as they will remain in my main external SSD drive.
• The main SSD is automatically backed up to the 2nd SSD drive using Goodsync software. I have this set up so it backs up every two hours which means I don’t have to worry about this manually.

 

I have been thinking of purchasing a 4 Bay NAS but after watching your classes, I have decided I am not a professional photographer with lots of clients so I will set up an external enclosure with 4 bays which will have 10 TB hard drives. I will set it up as a Raid system. If I eventually decide I would be better off with a NAS, then I will purchase the NAS with 4 bays and use the external drive as a 2nd redundancy. Backblaze wont allow uploads from a network so the external enclosure will be the PC non network drive that will back up my files to Backblaze and it will be synchronised with the NAS.

Thank you for your excellent classes. I have learnt a lot and got some new ideas and will now look at your Lightroom course.

Cheers

 

Paul Janssens