Backing up

On location backups

A colleague of mine recently requested my advice about buying a camera. As he became more and more engrossed in this wonderful hobby he enquired about how to best back up his images. I explained my method and told him to copy or adapt it to his way of working.

Here's what I do:

1. Shoot pictures
2. Copy the images to my laptop (leave the images on the card for now)
3. Copy* these images from the laptop to external hard drive number 1.
4. Copy* these onto External hard drive number 2.
5. Work on the laptop on any images that need a touch of Photoshop
6. Repeat steps 3 & 4
7. Once I am sure that hard drives 1 & 2 match, I format the cards in the cameras they are to be used in. Depending on the content, I sometimes completely wipe the cards*, leaving no trace of what was on there before. I then remove them from my laptop.
8. I give hard drive number 2 to a colleague who stores it for me. I do this because in the event of fire or whatever, I will have one copy at least of my images. (Needless to say, my hard drive is password protected.

 Nine terrabytes of space

 

To completely wipe my cards or hard drive clean, I use the excellent "Shredder" freeware programme by B. Nikhil Baliga. It's available from this website.

* For the copying, I use the free SyncToy from Microsoft. It has the option to copy only the files that have changed since your last backup. You can download it for free here.

Any backup system is better than no back up system .

What method do you use?

Thanks for reading.