The last thing anyone remembers to do is backup, so this year for World Photography Day, consider snapping some shots and saving them somewhere safe.
There are things we always remember. We remember to get dressed, to brush our teeth, and to take our phone whenever we leave. And then there are the things we almost never remember, or yearn to and for some reason still don’t. We don’t always floss, and we don’t always back up.
You might think that flossing and backing up have little in common, but they’re both important forms of hygiene and easy to amend. It’s important to be honest about these things, but they are fairly normal for people: most Australians don’t regularly floss, and backing up joins it.
However if you place any value on your photos, you’ll know your teeth are important for smiling, while the storage of those photos is also important, too.
World Photography Day rarely has a theme, but if we could cite one that’s important, it’s that storing your photos is just as important as taking them. Without the proper storage, your photos will cease to be, files of ones and zeroes disappearing into the ether never to be found or returned again.
Why you need to back up
It stands to reason that if you’re taking photos, or if you’re recording videos, they’re worth something to you. Unfortunately, devices can die, drives can fail, and your images can disappear just like that.
Before this journalist was writing about technology, he was actually a photographer, photojournalist, and photo operator working on fashion sets and out in the field. From personal experience, the number of times a memory card or a backup drive would fail is too large to remember, and it can simply happen through no fault of your own.
Sometimes technology fails. Sometimes technology dies. If your images are on that piece of technology, your files die with it.
They could be photos of the family, images of lighting you captured for the first time, or even special memories taken in 360 degree video for VR and the Vision Pro. They could literally be anything.
It’s why backing up is so important, particularly if these images and videos and memories are worth something, anything, to you.
Big backups at home
At home (or in a business), one of the more obvious backup recommendations to be made is in the form of a NAS drive, or a “Network Attached Storage” solution. Think of this as a hard drive attached to your network that you can simply save files to.
The idea is fairly simple — a drive attached to your network — but many NAS drives go a step further with the addition of a second hard drive.
Much like how two heads are better than one, two drivers are also better because you can choose to:
- Increase the size of your storage, or
- Mirror the drive and have a backup of your backup.
Either option means a better backup, either with more space or a form of redundancy, though they need a different form of hard drive to work.
These days, most NAS drives are bought without the hard drive, and come from brands such as Synology and QNAP, with you needing to bring your own hard drives. Some options come pre-made, such as the Synology BeeStation, set with 4TB of storage, but if you need more, you need a larger NAS with support for your own drives.
The best hard drives for this type of backup are actually made for a NAS, which basically means they’re hardened for regular write and rewrite cycles always happening in a 24/7 way. Think of these drives as being different because they’re always being accessed, rather than only sometimes on a computer, which may have idle time.
Drives made for this include WD’s Red and Red Pro, and Seagate’s Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro, and typically cover sizes ranging from 2TB all the way up to a staggering 26TB of space.
If you opt for more than one, a NAS can either boost the storage by doubling it, or make a mirrored copy in case one fails.
Pick the latter, and you’ve found a way to automatically make a backup and save your files if a hard drive fails, which can always happen.
Solid storage to go
Out in the field, you won’t have a network hard drive to rely on. NAS is for home and in the office, but there are other options available, and they’re typically faster, too.
On the go, you may want to turn to external hard drives, or the faster option: external solid state drives, also known as “SSD”. More like the memory inside your phone or laptop, solid state drives lack the moving parts of their hard disk siblings and are speedy like memory, making them faster than hard drives.
Speed isn’t the only win these drives offer, either. They can also be clad in durable casing and padding, making them more resistant to drops and the elements, handy if you’re worried your backups mightn’t survive a day trip or something else.
It’s no wonder that solid state storage is typically built for photographers and videographers to go, because their files are often big and need faster transfers, making them suitable for the speed of a solid state drive.
The faster the drive, the better it’s likely to be, though keep in mind, the more storage you have, the higher the price tag.
Portable solid state drives also lack the mirroring thing, so you won’t be able to automatically have some form of automatic redundancy for your backups. However, you will likely gain some water resistance and durability along with the speed, such as the IP65 water resistance in Samsung’s T7 SSD and in SanDisk’s Extreme Pro Portable SSD.
Back up to the cloud
One option that’s always worth considering is the cloud, and it’s something you can do from your phone and from your desk.
From your phone, backing up your photos to services such as Apple’s iCloud (or Photos in general), Google’s Drive (or Google Photos), Dropbox, Microsoft’s OneDrive, or any other will affect your phone plan’s downloads even though you’re uploading.
For most phone plans, the cost of downloading and uploading is combined, so if you have a lot of files, be mindful that you’re not only paying for the storage on a platform, but also the uploads to get them there.
With that in mind, you might want to wait until you’re home, where your home’s internet plan will likely have a little more to work with, and can upload in the background.
Each of these services comes with a free storage amount, but once you exceed that, you’ll need to pay for more storage to keep uploading, and to keep your photos backed up in the cloud.
How to make backing up a routine
Like any form of unpracticed hygiene, backing up can feel like a chore until you get in the swing of things and just keep doing it.
To start, pick your device or service, and just back up a few things. Start with a little before building it up to become a regular thing. You can do it once a week or two, but put it into your schedule so you don’t forget.
World Photography Day falls on a Tuesday this year, so consider putting 10 or 15 minutes aside every Tuesday or every second Tuesday to back some photos up that can’t be automatically backed up.
Most phones can automatically back up a photo library provided there’s enough storage, but other cameras won’t be so lucky. Grab the microSD or SD card from that camera, and back those files up to another drive or some cloud storage.
And if you don’t have any new pictures to back up, just snap a few more shots. It’s certainly the week for it.
