WE ALL NEED THIS REMINDER.

I forget. We all forget.

Help?

First time here? Hi, I'm Omar Gonzalez, a professional portrait and event photographer in the NYC/NJ area. On this channel, we talk cameras, lenses, and techniques to improve our photography.

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Happy holidays, guys.

[armoredbaguette]

At the start of the russian invasion a rocket destroyed my apartment, I've lost so many old photographs of my family. So scanning your old physical photos is always a good idea, something I wish was done before the disaster happened.

[Bonjurro]

I had an older synology 413j that I was backing up to with time machine and everything was showing as ok health wise but when I actually tried to restore from any of multiple backups none of them worked. So I think actually testing your backups occasionally is probably a good idea.

[judeemclaughlin]

My husband is in IT and they do redundant on and off site backup. Result is, we do the same at home. We have a NAS we are constantly using, we have an offsite NAS, we have cloud storage and external hard drives kept in a fire resistant safe in his office. Cleaning up, I found all of the CDs we used to use in the 90s and the portable SSDs.

[rutlegs]

Life is beautiful and fragile and fleeting. Be grateful for everything.

[labibhaddad]

I finally spent the money and invested in 2 Synology NASes, 4 bays each, I have about 15 TB of data, first back up was local then one NAS was deployed remotely and from there Synology takes care of synching, I never have to remember to backup, it does it on its own and keeps me updated. If your backup depends on you actively remembering to do it, it’ll never be done. That’s why I love me some Synology, as soon as my files are added locally or changed they are backed up to 2 separate RAID array NASes..thank you for the video and happy holidays to all

[E_House]

We lost everything (including the foundation of our home!!) due to a wildfire two years ago this Saturday and the only photographs that were saved were those that I had uploaded to SmugMug. So I lost all my pre-digital film photography, including childhood, college, and my wedding photos, and maybe 75% of my digital photography because I wasn't great at getting everything uploaded to SmugMug b/c I was forever behind on editing. I was good about backing everything up onsite but that didn't do us any good obviously. Live and learn. When we're finally back into the new house next year, we will definitely be doing things differently.

[GordonMoat]

Followed Viviene’s photography since her Tumblr days. She’s very talented. Lucky to escape the fire, though she did post they went to the hospital, so hoping they both recover fully soon.

[Jgheiler]

Funny, I know exactly what the "torcher was doing" because we did it ourselves. They were using a heat gun to warm the paint off the door so you can then easily peel off the paint. It's a common practice as the heat doesn't involve other caustic stripper chemicals. However, you have to be careful when doing that because you can start a fire....however, what I don't understand is how the entire building went up in flames, and why wasn't there a fire extinguisher - this could have easily been prevented with one.

[tomwestbrook]

I signed up for BackBlaze 3 days ago. It’s churning away uploading my approx 4TB total of digital photo files. I have a lot of film negatives I plan on digitizing next year, though, so the digital quantity will increase a lot. I’m also looking into a 4 bay Synology so I can have some insurance against hard drive failures. Happy holidays!🎉

[stayuntilforever]

I always print my favourite images and give them away as gifts. I keep all my printed images in a different building than my harddrives. But it's not very well organized. Next year I will do at least 5 photobooks for myself.

[JohnKrill]

Man, everything. I don’t know what I would do if I lost everything. It includes my work in Vietnam as a Marine photographer and maybe 150, 000 digital photos. Right now I’m thinking of getting an old friend letting me keep my backup at their house. They live 20 miles away. Should be a safe distance.
PS: I did donate something.

[TawaraboshiGenba]

I’ve had this in the back of my mind for years, and since last Black Friday I’ve been meaning to get two NAS servers to put one at home and one at a family member’s home, with data replication from one to the other. However, I think it’s a must to add hard drives in pairs with data mirroring, to protect yourself from data loss due to a single disk failure.

[MKNYC_]

My disaster recovery backup is on an AWS S3 bucket. If you use the Amazon command line interface you can write a simple command that backs up a folder to S3. Then I took that and sent it to their glacier storage. It was about 40 bucks to get 2TB of data in and moved to Glacier. But now it costs me $1.47 per month to have that data stored up there. Of course if I have to retrieve it, I’ll have to pay money for that retrieval.

[marshalljvanderhoofphoto]

This is a great reminder that as photographers we need to have a plan to manage data. It is really important, especially with client work to have backups. An additional reason to do this is because clients can also have loss. I've had a few clients come back to me years after their event (mostly weddings) and need a full copy of what was originally delivered because they lost everything. Such a great message. Great video.

[elblaino]

Thanks for the reminder, Omar. I recently got a NAS and haven’t yet figured out my new system with it, so I only have it and my hd backing up to the cloud (Wasabi) - instead of also having two external drives with copies I made weekly and put in a fireproof safe at home. Big learning curve for me, and I’m an “enthusiast” so less data but also less urgency at getting the new system up and running fully.

[mkanoute]

I update my backup hard drives (on sites or off sites) using Carbon Copy Cloner (not affiliated). I have a group of chained tasks that automatically run when I connect the had drive or on a schedule. These task incrementally update the backup hard drive while creating snapshots (which is a way of having an history). The incremental update makes it fast.

[dan.allen.digital]

If you are an Amazon Prime member you get free unlimited full resolution backup for photos including raw files (video is not free). With every SD card when it gets full, I go to my Amazon photos, create a new album for that batch and upload all the raw and JPGs. It usually takes a couple hours but it doesn't cost me anything extra and it gives me an off-site copy of all my raw files. This doesn't solve the video storage problem but it does give me a little sense of security knowing I have a full copy in the cloud of my still pictures. I Also have all my scanned family film photos uploaded to Amazon photos.

[pascalhibon]

For very large data, such as your 25TB NAS, you could opt to have another NAS off site that constantly backs up your main NAS. This backup NAS could be at the house of your mother in law. You could workout some compensation fee for the consumed electricity and internet usage with your mother in law. This setup would be less expensive than having some large cloud backup system. And it is for sure more flexible because the complete system is your own property. If disaster would struck, you have access to your backup immediately instead of having to rebuild the data on a new NAS which will take a very long time.

[glannewehr]

I JUST purchased a Synology 4 bay system with (2) 10Tb in a RAID 1 configuration. I have images from over 20 years ago on there, plus my current images/projects. I was using (2) systems running TrueNAS previously, one backing up to the other system. I just thought running 2 large computers were a bit overkill.

Currently living in a senior apartment complex where I'm always worried about some resident suddenly dying with a bunch of candles left burning, so I need to store a copy off-site. I checked into BackBlaze and others and I just don't want to spend that kind of money. But, I will be purchasing a smaller 2 bay Synology system to making backups off-site and keeping it at my nephews house about 20 miles away. I'll first do the full backup here at my location, then set it up at his house and do the incrementals thereafter so I'm not sucking up so much bandwidth with the initial full backup at first.

[ygftiui]

Some great ideas and reminders. thanks Omar