Back Up Your Photos and Files

Back it up, and back it up twice.

Even though technology can be a great thing, it can also be a bad thing. All electronics and anything technical will fail. Just like us, there's only one thing guaranteed in life and that's death. It will happen we just don't know when.

I can't stress enough the importance of backing up your files (data and photos), and not just backing them up in one place but two places. Especially if you're a photographer or business owner.

I learned this from experience myself. I had most of my photos backed up onto an external hard drive (my other files were backed up separately on a flash drive). As time goes by, I eventually clean out some of the photos from my computer every now and then. What's the harm? After all, they were backed up. One day I backed up my files and left my the hard drive out because I had to leave and didn't have time to store it away. I didn't notice it was gone until the next day. I tore the house apart looking for it. To make a long story short, my husband had a friend over while I was gone. That friend brought other friends we didn't know. Turns out one of them stole it. There were approximately 500,000 photos on that box. That's a lot of precious memories.

After feeling so sick from the loss, I followed the advise I've heard so many times before. I went out and bought two external hard drives. I store them in two different places.

Thankfully, about 6 months later, my husbands friend found the box that his friend took and returned it. I can't tell you the relief!! That was a miracle.

This isn't the only thing that can happen. You can loose it, have a fire, or it can (and it eventually will) just flat out quit working on you. I also recommend taking all those CD's that we used to put our photos on and backing them up to a hard drive. CD's fail too. I've had some that have. I've also had clients contact me asking if I still had their photos because either their CD failed, or the computer crashed and they didn't have them backed up. Don't forget to back up your phone too!

So before this happens to you, make sure you're backing up your files in two different places and back up at least weekly. In a photographers case, I back up when I download the photos from the camera, and then back up again after editing the photos. You can always accidentally a file and wish you had it backed up somewhere else before you reformatted your SD Card.  Yes, that's happened to me too, but thankfully it was backed up.

Have you had something like this happen to you, or do you have any other suggestions on backing up files? Comment below.