My Back-up Strategy

My Back-up Strategy to keep my (your) images safe:

In short, any image I shoot is in atleast two places at all times, having a back-up is crucial to my workflow and security of the work I do.

In the camera I shoot duplicate files to two separate cards at all times.  When it is downloaded into the computer, it is duplicated on two separate hard drives, and then backed up to two separate archive systems.  Only once the job is delivered and the client has signed off on all of the deliverables, are some of the back-up files removed, but even years after a job, I still have all of the files in at least two places.

Here are the lengthy details:

My image file workflow starts well before the day of the shoot. First I create an IPTC form that is specific for that job in PhotoMechanic.  The caption field is something like this:

“EVENT photographed {iptcdow}, {iptcmonthname} {iptcday}, {iptcyear4} at LOCATION. (© James D. DeCamp | http://JamesDeCamp.com | 614-367-6366)”

Everything in brackets { } is automagically filled in from the file creation time of the file.  I make great use of many of the automatic functions in PhotoMechanic and highly recommend this product, being a power user of it for more than 20 years.

By embedding all of this information into each and every file, it allows me to easily search for images on a whole host of information – creation date, person in the photo, location, etc.  It also impregnates each and every file with my contact information and copyright.

The day before the shoot, while organizing gear and charging batteries, I erase all my cards in the camera that I will be using those cards in (companion article on camera card precautions HERE).

At the shoot, I always have two cards in my cameras.  I mainly shoot with Canon 5D MkIV’s and make full use of the dual slots in the camera having the camera write duplicate RAW files to both cards. I primarily write to the CF card slot in the camera using either a 16 or 32 Gb card that is swapped out often, and I have a 256 Gb SD card in the camera that I use as a back-up.  The SD card is big enough that I can shoot on it all day and not worry about it, and it stays in camera and close by me all day.  The CF cards are swapped out to a card wallet that I carry ON MY PERSON all day long.  It is a ThinkTank Pixel Pocket Rocket™ wallet with a nifty tether that gets attached to my belt.

I like to shoot on smaller CF cards so that, should the worst happen and a card goes bad, I haven’t lost much data (even tho I have the SD card back-up).

Once the shoot is over, lets say a wedding, where I typically have more than 100 Gb of images spread out over many cards, I return to the studio and plug all of the CF cards in at once to my main workstation (Apple Mac Pro 8 Core 3 Ghz).

I have an array of six Kingston USB 3.0 card readers (why I use these readers HERE).  I also have four legacy Lexar Firewire card readers as well as several other card readers that I use on the road that I can plug into a USB bus if needed, but the 10 usually do the trick.

I ingest all of the cards at once using PhotoMechanic which automatically creates folders with the days date.  For a typical wedding its about 2500 images on 7 or 8 cards.  While being ingested, each file is renamed, IPTC data added and the files are stored in two separate locations on two separate hard drives on the main computer with a typical wedding taking about 25-40 minutes to download and dupe everything.  Typically I just go to bed – its been a long day and sitting there watching it doesn’t make it go any faster :-).

Overnight a chron runs in Carbon Copy Cloner and duplicates one of the two full folders over to my server (one of three Mac mini (Late 2012) 4 core 2.6 Ghz with an array of drives in several Sans Digital RAID towers that are configured as JBOD’s) so when I wake up in the morning I now have all of the files from the wedding in five places (CF Camera Card, SD Camera Card, Main Computer Drive 1, Main Computer Drive 2 and Server Drive 1) – this is too many 🙂 so I start paring things down.

Sans Digital 8 Bay TowerRAID JBOD Tower

PhotoMechanic lets me know if there where any ingesting errors. Typically there aren’t any, but if there is, I search for that card and download it again.  A second run error and I will pull the SD card from the camera and download from there.

Again, typically there are no errors and I check to make sure CCC did its run overnight to the server.  If it did, then I delete the images from the CF and SD cards.  Now I’m down to three locations for the original RAW files.

I work from just one folder on my main drive, using PhotoMechanic and going thru and culling the shoot down to about 5-600 images for a typical wedding.  These culled images get copied over to a third drive (an SSD for speed) that is used by Lightroom.  I import them into LR and begin to edit them.

This ends the typical second day.  🙂

Every evening Retrospect runs on the second of my three servers and backs up all of the drives across my system to one of two arrays of 8 Tb drives in two RAID Towers.  On Monday, Wednesday, Friday its to Array ONE.  On Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, its to Array TWO.

I now have the ‘primary’ 500 or so images in four places again, plus all of the images are now backed up to two independent archive back-up’s that I can pull from if everything goes south.

Once done in Lightroom, the entire session is exported as jpg’s, 5100 pixels long side, quality of 100% to a folder on my main hard drive on my workstation.  These are tweaked in Photoshop, if need be, and then uploaded to presentation galleries on SmugMug.  The 100% quality jpg’s are stored to SmugMug.

I run a script in Photoshop which re-saves the 5100px files and compressed them at a quality of 8 to save space and then saves a duplicate version, watermarked and downsized to 900 pixels.  These are off loaded to a USB thumbdrive and uploaded to DropBox for sharing with the client.

Each night a chron runs.  The folders with compressed jpg’s is duplicated to a server drive.  The server drives (and main workstation drives) are backed-up by Retrospect each night as well.

Once the job is complete, I delete the files from my main workstation.  The .xmp sidecar files from Lightroom are moved to the folder containing ALL of the RAW files on the server for future access if needed.  That way I don’t loose my work in Lightroom incase I would need to rebuild the jpgs one day.  The RAW files, .xmp sidecars and uncompressed jpg’s stay permanently on my server (I currently have 64 Tb of easily accessible hard drive space and its more than 3/4 full – I have more than 20 years of files :-).  I have a number of older drives off line with the oldest, less demanded files.

All of the RAW image back-up servers is constantly being backed up to BackBlaze at about 50Gb/ day.
All of the finished jpg’s are backed up to SmugMug.
God forbid, if everything gets fried in a fire or drowned in a flood, I will have everything off-site and can rebuild.

So to sum up – in camera, I have two back-ups.  Once in my system each RAW image file is in at least three places at all times, and then the jpg files are triple backed up as well, with at least two versions in house and a third off site on SmugMug.  I have made sure over time that SmugMug is a complete back-up (about 3 Tb) for all of my jpg files as a last resort restore, much of which is stored in hidden galleries not accessible to the public.  I also keep nearly a Tb of data on DropBox at all times, deleting off the older files only when I need more room.  This keeps about a nine months to a year of deliverable files backed-up.

Oh yeah, if you read carefully, I have three servers, but only listed jobs for two.  The third server is for running a plex media server and has half a dozen drives of media that I have converted from CD’s and DVD’s over the years.  It also serves as a web server that hosts several of my websites [ http://www.ohiophotojournalist.com, http://www.columbusvirtualtour.com, http://www.ohiophotojournal.com ] and works as an FTP drop point for my clients.

The JamesDeCamp.com website is actually hosted thru iPage, rather than my personal server.  I do that for dependability and security, as well as the convenience of mail hosting.  For a time I used my own server for mail hosting and sorting, but found the upkeep and maintenance too time consuming.

Does all this make sense?  Have any questions, please let me know or drop me a comment below.