Photographers worry about a lot of things. Planning the shoot, what is the lighting, will the concept work, the weather? Some of this is out of the control of the photographer. But one thing that photographers can control is the protection of the data.

Loosing the client’s images is bad. Very bad.

So the golden rule is always, for the paranoid like me, and I mean ALWAYS, keep two copies of an image file throughout the process. That means from the initial capture through to archiving the data after the project.

While on the shoot, I have a couple of way I do that. But what I’ll focus on here is the studio system.

Just to repeat, in case you misted it, ALLAYS KEEP AT LEAST TWO COPIES OF IMAGE FILES AT ALL TIMES. To do this I implemented a RAID1 system with the fine hardware from the team at G-Raid. Two 4T drive configure as RAID 1.

Perfect you may say? NO! This system only ensures that you’re uptime is robust. Uptime for the actual backup of the files. The backup system I use is an off-site (important!) cloud-based solution by the fine folks at CrashPlan.

So the logic it this. The RAID1 drive provides enough security (uptime) through drive (and image) redundancy to ensure that the files are back up off-site safely.

And this, my friends, allows me to sleep at night knowing your images are safe.

And worry about the weather for tomorrow’s shoot instead…

Peace.