Speaking to one of the guests at the wedding I was covering on Saturday he told me that their wedding photographer had lost the memory card with all of the photos from their wedding on it! For a start I was pretty amazed to hear that a fellow pro photographer would manage to lose the card and that they had only used one card to shoot the entire wedding.
My memory card strategy
Ever since I started photographing weddings I have always used a greater number of smaller capacity memory cards rather than just one or two high capacity cards. I do this so that in the worst case scenario where a card became corrupted and was unrecoverable then I will only have lost a smaller portion of the wedding photos. Thankfully this situation has never happened to me and I hope that it never will.
I also only use high quality Sandisk extreme III memory cards – I wouldn’t think to let wedding photos near an el-cheapo card! Sandisk cards have proven reliability and quality, that’s why I use them.
Until the photos from a wedding are safely transferred to my computer they stay physically on my person in a Think Tank Pixel Pocket Rocket memory card wallet that attaches to a belt loop on my trousers.
My backup strategy
Of equal importance is a backup strategy for after the wedding. The first thing I do on returning from a wedding is to transfer the photos onto my computer. The next thing I do is back them up onto DVD which are then sent off-site (to my Dad!) so that should there be a fire in my office then the original photos are still safe.
I use the online backup service carbonite which continually backs up all of my photos and I also run a nightly backup to an external disk. This ensures that my in-progress work on the photos is saved. Carbonite did save me once with some personal photos when the hard disk that they were on failed and was not recoverable – I was very glad that I had signed up to it then! I was once told that there are two types of hard disk – those that have failed, and those that will!
Once editing is complete I copy the finished photos to another DVD and send that off-site.
Conclusion
I don’t think you can be careful enough with data security and backups. I’m pretty happy with my strategy and I think that it covers pretty much any eventuality. In summary it is:
- Use a greater number of smaller capacity cards
- Only use high quality branded cards
- Keep cards on your person until they have been safely backed up
- Backup off-site, online and locally before and after editing
What’s your data security and backup strategy?