Backup Strategies for Professional Photographers

Let’s get one thing straight, right off the bat. If you are going to make a living as a wildlife photographer, then you need to start looking at every photograph you create as a business asset. Why? Because that is exactly what they are.

Your photographs are how you make money. They are your products for sale. They are your intellectual property. They are what pay your bills. And even though you may have sold a particular photograph once or twice, that photograph will continue to be an important part of your business and brand well into the future and possibly beyond.

So, if every photograph is a business asset, are you treating them as such?

This question dips its toe into so many different aspects of being a working wildlife photographer. But what I want to discuss today is our ability to protect our photographs, our business assets, our life’s work, from catastrophic loss.

Let’s face it. Shit happens. Hard drives crash. Power surges happen. Home break-ins occur.

My parents’ home was recently struck by lightning and every single wall outlet was blown completely out of the wall. What if this was your home and your computer and hard drives were connected to one of those outlets? Would you still have all your photographs? Would you have to start over?

These are the questions you need to answer immediately.

Going pro isn’t just about creating beautiful photographs. Going pro is also about understanding you are in business, and you need to think about and treat every photograph like a precious piece of art and protect it.

When I created the Journal of Wildlife Photography, of the countless emails we received from photographers around the world, one question kept popping up in our inboxes every single day. How do professionals back up and protect their work?

This, above all others, may be the most important question you can ask if you want to make a living at this. If you lose your photographs, then you cease to be able to make the residual income that is both the backbone and the bread and butter of most nature photographers.

A single photograph has the potential to make income for many years to come.

A single photograph has the potential to buy new lenses, cameras, plane tickets, and pay mortgages year after year.

But not if you lose it.

For this reason, backing up and protecting our work is one of the most important considerations we all must make. And while there are many different ways to go about doing this, all working photographers tend to have one thing in common here: they practice the 3-2-1 strategy.

What exactly is 3-2-1?

3 = the total number of copies you maintain of your photographs.

2 = the number of copies you keep onsite in your office.

1 = the number of copies you keep offsite from your office.

This strategy means you are covered for just about any and all potential problems save for the total collapse of civilization and life as we know it. In which case, your photographs are the least of your concerns at this point.

Did you have a hard drive failure? No problem.

Did your house burn to the ground? No problem.

The concept of having three different copies of all your photographs is straightforward enough. Multiple copies in multiple locations means safeguarding yourself against every worst-case scenario you can imagine. This is just good business practice.

However, we should probably dive a little deeper into the “2” and “1” part of this strategy.

Let’s start with the 2 copies of photographs on site.

Having multiple copies of your photographs where you work makes sense. If there is a problem, you can fix it right then and there. If data gets corrupted, you can quickly attend to this problem on the spot.

There is, of course, many ways that you can go about handling this part of your backup strategy. Some photographers like to simply have 2 separate hard drives with the exact same photos on each one. For me, however, this gets messy. My library of images is inching toward the 1 million mark. This means that as those drives fill up, I need two more drives on my desk to continue to expand. And then when those fill up, I need two more.

When this is what you do for a living, it’s imperative that you are in the field photographing as much as you possibly can. If you are in the field, then your library of images is constantly growing and expanding. And now, especially with the ultra-high megapixel cameras that wildlife photographers are using such as the Nikon Z9, the Sony A1, and the Canon R5, your drives will fill up twice as fast as they would have if you had been doing this just 5 years ago.

This is where the concept of RAID drives comes into play.

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks.

For us, all the emphasis should be placed on the first word: redundant.

RAIDs come in many different forms and sizes. Some are standalone products that come from big brands you already know the name of, such as Western Digital. Others are more complex, larger, and offer you a “bay” full of different drives that you can swap out or expand at any time.

For most of us, using a bay of drives makes more sense. It’s clean and tidy. You may have 10 drives you are working from all at once, but they are all stored in a nice neat little metal box, and they are all connected to your computer at once instead of you having to juggle a bunch of USB and power chords like so much office spaghetti.

There are companies out there such as Drobo and Synology that hand you fully packaged deals. You pick the size and space you need, and then simply use the accompanying software to set up.

Other companies assume that if you are using a bay of drives as a RAID, you know what you are doing with computers and thus simply sell you all the many parts individually for you to customize and build as you see fit.

For most photographers who are considering a RAID system for their in-office backup, starting out with a brand like Drobo or Synology is the easiest way to go. But if you are computer savvy and don’t mind tinkering and building and customizing your own computer, for instance, then Thunderbay RAIDs are a good option.

It’s important to understand, however, that there are many different RAID configurations as well. I am not going to discuss all the different types here. We are photographers. And if you are interested in a RAID system for backing up your photographs, then there are really only two configurations you need to know and understand: RAID 1 and RAID 5.

The most common type of RAID for non-techy users is the RAID 1. This type of RAID is simply known as mirroring. In essence, you have two drives that are connected together, although they only register as being one single drive. And when you upload a photograph to that drive, the RAID software puts the photograph on one of those two drives while automatically making a carbon copy of it to the other drive as well.

This is the simplest way of handling backup on site. But it does come with downsides.

Using a RAID 1 isn’t all that different from having a couple of hard drives that you make backups to yourself. Although, it does make it easier because the RAID is making the backup for you to the mirrored drive automatically. With any RAID, the various drives associated with the array are typically housed in one case. When you buy standalone Western Digital My Duo, for instance, and set it up as RAID 1, although it looks like 1 drive, and functions like 1 drive as far as you can tell, you are technically working with two different disks inside the case. This is infinitely better than having two separate drives on your desk, of course. However, when you need 10tb of space, for instance, technically you need to purchase a 20tb RAID. You will only be able to use 10tb of that for storing your photos because the other 10 is just the mirrored copy of that drive.

What happens when you want to expand this?

What happens when you need more room?

Well, you need to buy more disks to install in your bay of drives or buy another separate RAID 1 setup – again, like the Western Digital My Duo for instance.

If you are just beginning to amass a large collection of photographs, the RAID 1 system may be all you need. However, if you have a very large collection of images, the RAID 1 can get expensive since you will need to buy twice the amount of storage that you need.

One big catch to the RAID 1 system, however, is that since it’s designed to have one drive mirror another drive, is something happens that corrupts or destroys photos on one drive, the other will update to mirror it.

This doesn’t mean that if a disk goes bad, you will lose all your work. It’s the opposite of that. If 1 disk goes bad, you have the other one ready and waiting to pull your photos off of and transfer to another backup until you can get things fixed again.

But, if you get a virus, or there is some type of software issue where images are lost, 1 drive simply mirrors what the other one looks like.

It’s important to understand that this isn’t all fool proof. There are issues that can occur with all backup systems – including RAID arrays. But this is why we use the 3-2-1 strategy, just in case.

RAID 5 is completely different from RAID 1, and it’s really complicated in how it works. But it’s the best of all worlds.

When you have a RAID 5, you need a minimum of 3 disks to work with. A RAID 5 setup takes the data of a single file and breaks it up across two of those disks like disk 1 and disk 2. Doing this means that your computer gets the speed of two drives running to load 1 file for you, which speeds up access time. Then, on the third drive, the RAID 5 stores all the information necessary for rebuilding everything that is on disk 1 and 2. So, if there was ever a drive failure or a problem, you can literally rebuild two entire disks worth of information from 1 disk.

Like I said, complicated.

However, the benefit to this is that you get more space for less money. With the RAID 1, if you need 10tb of space, you need to purchase 2 x 10tb drives. With the RAID 5, you could buy 3 x 5tb drives. The first two add up to 10tb. And then the third is used to rebuild 1 and 2.

Me, I use a RAID 5 setup with 20tb of storage. In doing so, I have 3 x 10tb drives inside my Thunderbay RAID.

This system gives me increased speed for accessing my files, it allows me to have more storage for less, and gives me the redundancy to rebuild my drives if there is a problem.

In addition to this, I also use an 8-bay housing for my RAID. With this, I have 3 x 10tb drives that are part of my RAID 5. Then, I have room to install an additional 5 drives into the bay to be used as I want. For me, this means that my stock video files all live on a separate “drive” than my photography. This also means that when / if I ever want to upgrade my photography backup system for more storage, I can pull out the video drives, install 3 new hard drives for the new RAID 5 and move the photos over to the bigger storage via Lightroom.

Working with RAID 5 is not complicated to do. It’s just complicated in how it all works.

If reading the above paragraphs about how I have an 8-bay housing for all of this, and how I can expand and upgrade and swap out and setup different drives for different purposes is confusing, then looking into a Drobo or Synology system is going to be the way to go for you. Companies like Drobo create turnkey solutions for photographers so you don’t need to think about or know how to build these things for yourself.

If you are a working photographer, it’s time to get very serious about how you are backing up your photographs in your office. Although there are different ways of going about this – such as the multiple hard drive option I mentioned above – this is not a real solution for the long term.

To put it simply, invest in a RAID system NOW. It will simplify your life, and give you peace of mind about your photography like you have never had before.

But this is only the first part of the 3-2-1 strategy.

The next part of the equation is the “1” in the 3-2-1, meaning: 1 copy offsite.

Stay tuned. . .