The Importance of Back Up

Being a wedding photographer, this is a subject that I thought was near and dear to my heart. In this age of digital data, maintaining clients images is pretty much the second most important part of my job. For a Libra, I am exceedingly paranoid about back ups. I keep weddings and portrait sessions on two separate external hard drives not associated with my main computer, on my servers, and on DVD back up.

Unless...you are talking about my own personal data. Pictures of my kids, my family vacations. That I stored on one external hard drive. That went bad this past week. Is it backed up? Some of it, yes. But when I get enmeshed in wedding season I let personal stuff fall aside and I was "going to get" to archiving all of the pictures from the past year "when things slowed down". When I made the call to a company that retrieves lost data the representative told me that if she had a dime for every photographer who called with lost personal data she would be a rich woman. What's the saying about the shoemaker's children have no shoes? The good news is they have a 90% success rate retrieving the data. The bad news? It's going to cost me around 2K. Yeah. As in two thousand dollars. That's putting a price on memories, isn't it?

I shared this story last night with a bunch of my girlfriends who, like everyone else have digital cameras and tons of photos stored on their computers. And when I asked them if they had the photos backed up to CD's/DVD's or archived somewhere else (Kodak and some of the camera makers offer off site storage of your digital images) they admitted they didn't. They didn't understand that if their computer hard drive failed that those photos were likely gone forever, or savable only by very costly means.

So, don't put it off. Even if you do it a few a day, back up those pictures. If your computer doesn't have a CD burner then go buy an external one that will plug into a USB port. The cost of backing up the photos will save you a lot of heartache and money.