San Diego Wedding Photographer

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Backing up your images. This is just so incredibly important for both business and personal reasons. Having gone through four hard drive crashes in about five years (with three of them happening in one year!), I know the importance of backing up your images, firsthand :)

I was asked this recently on my formspring page…

“How do you go about backing up all of your images??? How do you organize them??”

You know, I think this is a very common question that many photography both ask and get asked. I know I asked this question a lot before I had my current set up and I now know how often I get asked the question on my twitter and facebook :) So here’s how I go about backing up my images. There’s probably a million ways, with many being better than mine here, but this is what works for me…

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My hard drives.

I do triple back ups. That’s right. Three. I have four hard drives used at all times. I use Western Digital 2TB external drives as they work just fine and are always really affordable (at the moment, a 2TB drive is $80 including tax and shipping!). They are labeled in the following way…

• 2TB Weddings (which also includes engagements and portraits)
• 2TB Travel (which does NOT include my destination weddings — those stay in the weddings drive)
• 2TB Personal (photos of Clive, Lindsay and I, the dogs, friends, our iPhone photos/videos, etc)
• 2TB Current (it doesn’t say “Current” but rather the date in which I started using the drive)

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Back up #1.

So for my 2TB Weddings drive I do the following. I start out with folders for each year. So on the opening page it would have a few folders that say “Weddings“, “Engagements“, and “Portraits“. If you clicked “Weddings“, for example, you’d see folders a few more folders that say “2009“, “2010“, and “2011“. If you clicked “2011“, each folder inside is labeled by the wedding date followed by the names of the couple and their wedding location (i.e. “04/18 Astami and Chan Bali“). Inside that folder is another series of folders…

• LR (contains the LR edits — corrected for color, contrast, exposure, tone, etc. No artistic flare or photoshop work — just like taking film to a lab)
• RAWs (contains the RAW files)
• Blog (contains the blogged images — these are photoshopped or have my personal flare added as I see fit)
• 1 Star RAWs (I’ll explain this below)
• Album images/design (contains the images I pick for the album and the design)
• CAT 04/18 Astami and Chan Bali (this is where the Lightroom catalog for this wedding will go)

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Back up #2.

So that’s how I organize them on my main “2TB Wedding” drive, but how about backing them up? That’s where my “2TB Current” drive comes in. I put everything I shoot on there (therefore these fill up fast). Right when you open the drive, you’ll see 3 folders…

• Travel
• Personal
• Weddings

So in this case, the backup would be 2TB Current > Weddings > 2011 > 04/18 Astami and Chan Bali.

Inside that folder is typically one back up folders.

1 Star RAWs. In sorting my images, I usually rank 1 through 5 stars in Lightroom. The 1 star images are basically everything that’s in focus or wacky due to funny faces/blinks/nip slips (oh yeah, that happens more than you think ;). I tend to deliver the images from 3 stars and up. No set rules here, but that’s usually the case. Anyways, it saves a ton of space on my 2TB Current drive to only back up the 1 star RAWs. When I export the RAWs, I also export them with their LR settings. So now I have two back ups of not only the RAWs, but also the settings made for those RAWs in Lightroom.

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Back up #3.

So the 3rd and final back up? Remember that “LR folder” in my “2TB Wedding” drive? That goes straight into Smugmug (and there’s a plugin for Lightroom so you can export directly into Smugmug). Smugmug uses tons of backups all over the globe, doesn’t mess with the quality of your uploaded images, and you can get a free back up of all your images whenever you want them (there’s an awesome “download all” feature from Smugmug now!). In order to lose these images, there’d have to be some electric shutdown over the entire globe!

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As far as my “2TB Personal” and “2TB Travel” drives, it’s basically the same thing as above.

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Well, I hope that helps! Feel free to ask questions or add some ideas. I know there are probably quite a few better, more efficient ways to back up your images :) And if you’re looking for more hard drive space, it’s cheaper than ever! Western Digital 2TB external drives are, at the moment, on sale for $80 after tax and shipping! There’s no excuse for not backing up your images these days ;)

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And since posts like this need some sort of photo, here’s a baby hawk in my tree last week!

Bobby

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This is my son, Clive…

This is our friends’ son, Jack…

One fine day at the Wild Animal Park, Jack repeats “dada-dada-dada…” over and over again and cracks Clive up…

And here’s the video proof. The baby sounds and laughs are almost too much to handle. And the music is, imo, ripping…

Here’s a link to the video for facebook and feedreaders

Fans of the Pixies might notice the baby version of “Gigantic” being played in the background. This is the raddest album for babies ever! Definitely download it! It’s called Rockabye Baby! Lullaby Renditions of The Pixies. They also have renditions of bands like Radiohead, Nirvana, the Ramones, and way more. They are amazing if you have kids and are sick of listening to baby music ;)

Having kids is pretty amazing.

Bobby

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