The Highway in Utah and a quick tip Tuesday about backing up your images in the field

The only real guarantees in life are of course death, taxes, ……. and hard drive failure.

Hasn’t happened to you yet? Don’t worry, it will. More on that in a minute though….

Image of the Day – The Highway in Utah

I’ve always wanted to capture one of those road runner (meep meep) and coyote highway shots and the desolate highway in Southern Utah was the perfect place to do just that. I shot the one below while exploring that part of the country about a year ago. Although September was not really the most comfortable time of year to be out in the middle of the desert, I had a little time between events I was lighting out on the West coast to wander, so I dealt with it. Luckily this one was taken not far from the air conditioned car 🙂

So as I am sure I have mentioned here before, I’m not a pro photographer, but like you I am sure…..my images still mean a lot to me! While out on these little journeys I give myself, I take pictures….alot of pictures! As you can imagine, it would be a shame to loose them! Backing up is a no brainier. Still amazes me that so many I talk to still don’t take that seriously.

I have a pretty simple backup strategy when in the field (or in the case above, the air conditioned car). Nothing gets deleted off of the memory cards until it is backed up….period.

A great option for this kind of storage is the Lacie portable hard drive below. I have used 2 of these, a main “A” and a backup “B”, for a few years now and I highly recommend them.

Check it out at B and H here! (affiliate link)

The workflow process begins right at the import into Lightroom. The raw and movie files are all imported into the A drive into a file structure that I create for each separate camera I am using. At that point of import, I also click the backup option by checking the “make a second copy to” box (see image below) to back them up to the B drive.

So to be clear, the images are not stored on the laptop but on drive A with a backup on drive B.

Easy peasy!

In addition to having 2 copys of my files, I also quite frequently export some of my final processed images over to drop box for online storage. Although this 3rd copy might seem like paranoia, it is definitely a peace of mind process that ensures I will have my best shots in the event that loose all of my gear.

Man, thats a frightening thought isn’t it?!

As this last step is a somewhat cumbersome process and one that I don’t always remember to do, I am now in the process of using Backblaze (again, see below) The reason I LOVE this service is the option to back up external drives. I my case, I will backup the A drive and that ensures I have all of my images backed up 3 times till I get back to the studio and move them to the Synology server.

PERFECT!

And at $ 5.00 a month, it doesn’t break the bank 🙂

I chat a bit more on the video below. The main points are covered above, but I stretch it out a bit in a 7 minute or so ramble….. (I was a wee bit tired)

Well thats it for my Tuesday quick tip…..(delivered a couple days late…..again……)

Or watch the video here!

And one more thing, this is my process. There are of course many ways to do this, but not having a strategy at all is a recipe for disaster!

I think I linked to this before as well, but here is another great post from Chase Jarvis about his process right here.