Without film we as photographers are so vulnerable to photo loss. We can’t just put our photos into a folder, file, box, or safe and walk away. RAW files add up to Terrabytes quick! Even JPG’s can create some large archives for a person. With 200 GB’s of RAW photos I back up my library in a number of ways.
My lightroom library is on 2 drives inside of my Mac Pro and set as a RAID. After I import a job I immediately burn the job to DVD’s (2 copies) and put it away safe. I have 2 Drobo’s which back up my library. One Drobo hosts my iTunes & Lightroom libraries and the other Drobo backs up my entire computer & Lightroom library. At this point I have numerous copies of my photos on drives. Too make me comfort free I also use my Zenfolio account to host JPG copies of my photos and Amazon S3 to act as another backup of my entire RAW Lightroom library. Now that is storage!
Let’s recap
- 2x internal hard drives as a RAID (main library)
- 2x Drobo’s – RAW Backups (both with 4 drives)
- Zenfolio – JPG backups
- Amazon S3 – RAW backups via Jungle Disk
It’s expensive being a photographer but it would be a tragedy to loose the photos so I feel all of this is necessary.
How do you backup your photos?
