How to save your photos

This is how to save your photos so they will not be lost when your hard drive crashes.

How do you back up your photos? Comment below!

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[annecomer]

Thanks Tim for the information. I nearly had a hard drive crash in 2019. I have 100, 000 + photos, it gave me a wake up call. Had sort of backed them up to a portable external hard drive but never used to keep it up to date. My computer tech. advised that I get a NAS system, there is another PC in the house. I now have a 3 x 5TB NAS system, I now don't worry about my photos, if I need to get out of the house in an emergency I can just pick up the NAS and go. Best thing I ever did.

[leonflack]

Great explanation of back-up options; not seen anything with such a clear explanation of RAID + Cloud options used together, many thanks for doing this.

[nrlondon]

Hi Tim. Not only are you a master photography you are also a master teacher. My set up is that I have two SSDs on my computer. The first contains the operating system and software. The second contains working area. SSDs are so fast. If I am doing a time lapse or other video, I will copy my files to the work drive. I also have an exteranl USB drive for my Lightroom photos plus I make a Lightroom second copy to separate external hard drive. All of my drives, except for the work drive, is backuped to the cloud using Backblaze. They have unlimited storage for a reasonable rate. However, as you said, it would take awhile to retrieve all my files if I had a total failure. Thanks for the video. Nyall

[halynav.]

Hello, Tim, thanks for this video! It helps me a lot! I'm not a technical person and this presentation is very nicely done so I undestood all staff. I'm using Dropbox for many years to protect my photos & important documents. I used to use an external hard drive before Dropbox, but not now. I believed that Dropbox is enough... I'll reevaluate the pertinence of external hard drive. I happy to learn from you that now we have a very small hard drive to safe photos particulary during travel (It's not Internet everywhere :)). I'm happy owner of your Complete Pack, I'm looking forward to become your Fine Landscape Photography Student (affter my cardiology exam in September 2021). You are so great teacher, Tim! I'm so happy to learn from you! Sincerely, Dr. Halyna Vakulenko, Montreal area, Canada.

[aladcock]

Watched video and included good information. I plan to be there at the Summit

[lindahansson]

This was so helpful.Thank you. I've been racking my brain trying to find out a simple and safe way to do this. At this point I've got 3 different HDD. They were bought some time ago and are starting to fill up. Now it's time for a new set up, because it's so confusing having photos on different HDD's even though one of them is copied to a second one for safety. And I also ment to keep one of them at work just in case something happens. Well as you can tell this is bound to drive anyone crazy, trying to figure the mess.

[joepaulbottomlee]

Before there was cloud storage I had to use at first floppy disks, then 3.5 disks, external hard drives, CD Roms, DVDs, blue-ray disks. I still use the blue-ray disks. My current system is two SSD external drives in a mirror setup. When these contain enough data to fill a blue-ray disk I make 3 copies on disk. One for home, one for safety deposit box, and one to a relative in another state. Since I subscribe to Amazon for other good reasons, I use the Amazon Photo service for my cloud storage. I run it at night while I'm sleeping. And I have lost some of my digital images before because I didn't have duplicate copies in different locations. For forty years I kept my film sides in archival sheets in a fire-proof file cabinet and never lost an image. But with digital, it is so easy to lose a whole bunch of images all at one time. I know and most of us know we need to back up of computer system. But it is more important to back up our data (anything we create, documents, photos, videos, etc...) that can't be replaced. But operating systems and software can. One other thing I would like to point out is to consider the format that you use to save your data. I try to use a format that is considered "across-platform" so that as technology changes you can still access your data. Even them you might need to convert your data to a new format in the years ahead.

[anneschneyder]

Thanks Tim.
How do you save and backup pics when you are travelling?
Cheers

[peterguman]

Great video. When I last checked, Dropbox would not work copying from external drives.

[kkt]

Excellent video. Thanks for creating this. Have a couple questions about your use of Dropbox. How do you get enough cloud space. Just signed up for Dropbox Professional and that gives me 3 TB of storage. Also, what sort of sync are you using between your local storage and Dropbox?

[LotusArtsCreations]

I have several hard drives. I also use the CLOUD. I am seeing now that many of my images are not available in the past month or so. I usually take photos in duplicate incase there is a crash or I lose an image by accident.

[alfred]

Great video. I currently backup my camera images to my windows 10 Quick Access "Pictures" whose location is on a separate D drive (not C drive) which in turn automatically syncs with a QNAP NAS RAID1 using Q Central and Qsync client. So every time I save my photos onto "Pictures\Lumix G7" they are automatically synced with the QNAP Pictures shared folder.

[ArefAlragehi]

Thanks for the explanation Tim. Is this drive you use the WD My Book Duo RAID? I know this was not intended as a review but I am curious to know your experience and how you configured it to RAID 5 as they seem to be RAID 0 out of the box with the option to configure to RAID 1 (per their page)

[lynnesunshine]

Great info Tim! I have 2 x 1T backup drives and want to merge them or what would you recommend?

[mcarp]

I haven't had a hard drive crash, yet... I put my photos on an external hard drive, back up that hard drive and then back it up to a third drive that I keep in a fire-proof box (should probably be off-site). I have "some" photos in the cloud, but I need to get serious about an automatically updated cloud storage.
So, Tim, how do you make sure that your photos (from camera or edited) get automatically uploaded to the cloud?

[wdb]

I hope you know all hard drives are not RAID. You only have RAID you buy RAID.