This is the story of a wedding photographer who was robbed- cameras, cards and external hard drives, all stolen from his home office. The thieves in Winnipeg, got his wedding images AND the backups. The whole wedding gone with no hope of reenacting or replacing the images.
The weepy bride has to hit up attendees for their snapshots, in hopes of cobbling together an album.
The Moral of the Story? Online storage IS a good great idea for everyone, especially for destination wedding photographers. There are hundreds of online storage options out there with prices as low as $5 for 5GB of space. Check out Top Ten Reviews’ matrix of online storage services.
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6 Comments at "Backup your images. Online."
Data backups are as essential as they are inconvenient to do, there is no arguing that. Online storage can be a bit pricey for us photogs who save every pixel captured, but I found BackBlaze.com in January which charges $5 for unlimited storage. Yes there are a couple of strings attached, but it’s still a great value in my book. This backup saved my bacon when I had to perform a system recovery only last week, and I have been able to restore every single data file I lost, even the photos, and Lightroom sidecar files.
This is not a paid advertisement, but testimonial from a satisfied customer who has learned how valuable regular backups are.
So, whatever system you choose, take it from someone who has learned from experience: if you don’t have any backups of your photos, start making some today, and if you do have backups, make sure you keep them up to date.
My suggestion: carbonite.com
It’s UNLIMITED space for around $4.50 a month (but done in a single, yearly fee) and requires little to no technical knowledge to set it up and CONTINUOUSLY back up all of your files.
Because I’m still working on a G4 Mac, I can’t use the service, but friends I know love it. Think of it as a low-cost insurance policy. I’ll have my wife on it soon, now that she’s had yet another wipe of her HD after sending the HP laptop in for warranty work (though I backed it up first this time).
For someone like me who keeps all of his RAW files, I can forsee a day soon when the local backup drives I have are going to be full! Between thieves, fires, disasters, and growing storage space, online backups might be just the thing for many people.
I suggest Smug Mug–unlimited backup for jpegs and tiffs, and with Smug Mug Vault, you can add your PSD and RAW files. It isn’t the same as these other services, but it suits my needs and the price is definitely right!
A Flickr pro account is $30 per year and they allow unlimited uploading.
I have off-site backups and online backups but in the end I decided that the best way to head off this problem was to install a really good alarm system. My hard drives are spread out in multiple boxes / machines so even if they take the time to grab my computer, they won’t have my data. With my alarm going off, I don’t think that they’ll take the time to find all my NAS units. And if they do, the cops will get ‘em!
I just use my webhosting server. I have unlimited storage, and I’ve paid 2yrs. for 75 bucks. Can’t really beat that, and it’s as simple as FTP.
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