Backing Up Your Wedding Photographs

You've received your wedding gallery, you've viewed them countless times, you've shared them with friends and family. You're obsessed with them. So what do you do? Just let them sit in your photographer's online gallery? Leave them on your USB stick?

This comes from a place of love, not from a place of telling off. Please, please, please, please pleaaaaaaaase download your photographs and back them up properly. I can't emphasise how heartbreaking it is to lose photographs that are precious to you (I say this from experience - it happened to me as a teenager with all my little digital camera photos).

To put this into context, things have changed slightly that have brought me to bring this to everyone's attention - I'm not just having a little 'back your photos up' social media spree for the fun of it.

Unlimited cloud storage is becoming more and more expensive (and honestly harder to find) and physical storage like hard drives and memory cards are now extortionately expensive.

Companies have found due to the rise in Cryptocurrency and AI that offering unlimited storage is a business model that is now financially unsustainable. People are abusing the offer and simply hoarding data.

What does this mean for photographers? In a nutshell - we can no longer keep our galleries forever (this makes me cry a little inside). At some point, our cloud and or physical storage or online gallery becomes full. And hang on, before you say 'what about hard drives?'. I personally have a RAID server which has a 5TB mirrored capacity. Without all the technical mumbo jumbo: this essentially means I have a big old hard drive that mirrors onto itself and is backed up to a remote server for back up in case of a fire or theft.

But ultimately, despite all of this. It means regardless, my data has a limit. And whilst yes, I can get a new hard drive, what happens to that other hard drive? It sits in storage and gathers dust. Sure, no problem.

That itself isn't the issue. What is the issue however, is that eventually the software on these hard drives become redundant and do not work with the latest computers; as I found a few weeks ago when I plugged in a personal hard drive to have a nose at what was on there. It didn't work with my computer. And guess what? The manufacturer had stopped offering updates on that machine because it was ancient. So that hard drive that I had kept for over 10 years, was more or less, useless.

There are however (before you go into a total Camilla inflicted panic) lots of ways you can back up your photographs properly and thoroughly - and inexpensively - to save yourself the heartache.

Start with a cloud storage. Whilst I love a hard drive and I love a physical album or prints or frames. These aren't protected against physical damage or theft. A wonderful industry colleague of mine lost all of her hard drives (which were luckily backed up to a remote server) in a house fire last year. She made the point of messaging in our industry chat group and said 'please make sure you've backed everything up off site! Imagine if I hadn't of done that? I'd have lost all of my current clients unedited images'. A thought that makes me feel physically sick.

The average wedding gallery (that I personally deliver) rarely exceeds 15GB which in the grand scheme of things is not a lot. Well. You would be pleased to know that Google Drive offer free storage up to 15GB (this does include emails however so be careful if you use Google email). From a quick look online, to add another 100GB to your account, it's £1.59 a month (don't quote me on this). What would you prefer? A chocolate bar a month or your wedding photographs stored safely? Please bear in mind (sorry negative Nelly here) that you need to ensure your account is secure with any online portal - choose a good password and authorise 2 step verification.

A second option is Dropbox. Again, similar to Google Drive and also relatively inexpensive. A third option (and perhaps my favourite for personal use, drumroll please..) is Amazon. If you're an Amazon Prime customer, you get unlimited personal cloud storage for you and your family. So if you pay that £7.99 a month, just back them up now! Do it now! There is no excuse.

Now, whilst a cloud storage is the most secure option, I would still encourage you to still have a back up on site somewhere. The rule of back up to me, is having something stored in more than one place. So, great, you've got cloud storage. Now grab your photographs and either store them on another family members Amazon or Dropbox or Google Drive or put them on a little portable hard drive - not a USB stick. This really does give you the most redundancy. If heaven forbid, your Google Drive or Amazon account is hacked into and for some reason they delete your files, you still have another back up.

I do apologise, that was quite a brutal blog post wasn't it? Well, it felt a bit shouty in my head. I'm sorry I'm sorry. But your wedding photographs are amongst some of the most important photographs of your life. Those photographs will get passed down and printed for years to come and the thought of them not being backed up properly (given my career) truly breaks my heart. I cannot stress enough, of how upsetting it is when you lose photographs. I can no longer show my future children photographs of me and my friends as teenagers because I didn't back up that flimsy hard drive.

For the sake of £1.50 a month, or a few hours of a day just transferring and downloading everything accross. I promise you with all my heart - that it will be worth it. And ps. A lasting comment for extra bonus points, get your photographs put in a physical album as well. I still look at my parent's wedding album now.