I have been on the lookout for some backup options for all of my photos lately. It took a lot of time and research to make sure that I knew what I needed, and that what I was getting was going to work best for me! The more info I found, the more I found contrasting opinions, and of course, the companies that come out with the backups themselves are biased, and are doing their best to sell you THEIR equipment. I reached out to other photographers to see what they were using and get some first person opinions, and that helped me figured out which one I wanted to go with.

Now if this is all going WAY over your head, let’s break it down just a little bit! Mind you, I didn’t know any of this about 2 weeks ago.

Image Backup for Photographers

It should be common sense that as photographers, we need to be backing up our work. If someone is paying for you to document a moment in their life, be it their family photos, or even their wedding, we need to be sure that we have those images backed up. And then backed up again. And then preferably one more time. Now, this is all depending who you ask. Some would say that two backups are fine. I would tend to side on the idea that it’s not. If you have two backups of your images, in the same location, and let’s say someone breaks into your studio, and steals your two backup drives. You’re left with nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Now let’s replay that situation, and say you had three of those backups and one of them was in another location. Now you’re onto something. Someone steals them, or you lose them, or they become corrupt, or ANYTHING that can happen to make it so you lose your precious work, hopefully you would have them SOMEWHERE.

This is when I started thinking myself.

When I shoot a wedding, I have both my cameras set to shooting 2 SD cards of RAW files. That gives me -techically- four sets of backup. I’m usually shooting with a 35mm on one side, and a 85 on the other, but if it came down to it, and both SD cards pooped out on me during the wedding, I would still have my other camera shooting at least 2 more cards of similar images. Now the probability of that happen isn’t too high, but just in case. Now after I shoot the wedding, immediately when I get home, I start backing up my images to my computer on a backup drive. Once they are on my computer, I put away the SD cards, and don’t shoot on them until after the wedding is delivered. Boom. Problem solved, right? WRONG.

This is the part that got me in a pickle. Not really though. I have been lucky enough to not have an issue (knock on wood). But once I would edit the images, save them onto PASS (which is an online photo gallery that I deliver to my clients with), then I still would have them on my backup drive, but only there. I would format my cards, and then ended up with only one hard copy of the images. This is when I knew that I needed something else. I know that some photographers use online storage. I know that if you are a prime member, you can use amazon to backup photos! Did you know that?! Oh yes, it’s amazing. BUT if you’re like me with sub-par internet, it would take YEARS for all those RAW files to be backed up. I have no patience, and wasn’t about to try that, so i needed a different option. So I started looking into different drives.

This is about the face I made when looking up all this info. HA!

DAS

DAS stands for Direct-Attached Storage. Pretty simple. It’s directly attached to your computer, usually through a USB, or thunderbolt cord!

NAS

I’m no pro when it comes to any of these systems, but what I found from my research could be helpful for someone else out there, so here we go. I know that it stands for Network-Attached Storage. As soon as I figured out that I would have to run the device from my “network,” I wasn’t interested. Like I mentioned, my internet is slower than dial-up and there’s no way I was going to be that patient. This is a great option for those out there that have a better network.

RAID

There are different backup systems, but the one that caught my eye the most were the RAID systems. A RAID is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks. Thank goodness they shortened that one. There are six levels of Raid systems, but I’m only going to dive into the first two, a RAID 0 and a RAID 1. Raid 0 means that the drive is just a single drive. It save the images once and then you have it, just like any little individual hard drive you can buy at Best Buy. Raid 1 means that the drive is mirrored. The data that is stored is generally mirrored on two separate drives, though it could be more than that. This is the RAID that I wanted to go with. I purchased a 8 Tb drive, so that means I basically have two 4 Tb drives that my photos I add to the device will be mirrored between the two. Tada! Now I have AT LEAST two backups already.  There are so many different brands and styles of a RAID system that you can buy, but I went with the G-technology G-RAID USB. All G-technology drives are formatted for MAC computers, and I use PCs, but it was SUPER easy to switch. You just have to download the utility manager and change the RAID of the drive, and then format it to be used on Windows. Super simple! Moving on.

Now there’s so much more fancy info and differences between DAS and NAS, but I really just wanted to get down to it. The one that was going to work best for me was the DAS and I needed a RAID 1. Next step is finding a different internet provider, and to start uploading not just my Jpegs online, but my RAW files as well! Hooray for technology!