Ideally, you should keep both a local and off-site backup of your photos. We’ll talk about how to do this using a computer (Mac or Windows) and external storage.
We’ll also show you a simple file organization system that makes backing up your photos quick and easy. Plus, the best part is – it’s super fun!
Back Up Your Photos on Multiple Devices
The best way to backup your photos is to have multiple copies. This is also known as redundancy and ensures that, should one of your devices fail or get lost, you have a complete copy to restore from. In the photography world, this typically means having a backup on your desktop computer, a hard drive in your home office, and a cloud storage solution like Dropbox or Google Photos.
This way, if something happens to your primary computer or the hard drive at home, you can still restore from the backup. And, if you want to take things a step further, you can even store a copy of your backup on a separate hard drive in another location, such as your studio or a friend’s house.
If you’re using a Mac computer, you can easily back up your photos to an external hard drive or to the cloud with Time Machine, which comes standard with OS X. And, if you’re a PC user, you can use a USB 3.0 external hard drive or a NAS (network-attached storage) device from brands such as Synology and ASUSTOR.
Alternatively, you can backup your photos to the cloud with Google Photos or Amazon Photos. Both services offer unlimited photo storage and have a mobile app and desktop software that makes it easy to access and manage your images.
With both services, you can back up photos in their original resolution or a lower quality version that saves space. The free accounts give you 5GB of storage, and if you need more, you can purchase additional storage through Google One or Amazon Prime.
No matter which solution you choose, it’s important to regularly review and update your backups. This not only ensures that all your files are safely backed up, but it also provides an opportunity to declutter and delete extraneous files or duplicates that can fill up storage space and cause confusion. In addition, a regular review of your backups is an excellent opportunity to refresh your workflow and create a plan that meets your unique needs as a photographer.
Back Up Your Photos to the Cloud
The loss of irreplaceable images is every photographer’s worst nightmare. Fortunately, there are a few easy steps that almost anyone can take to help prevent this from happening. And best of all, they all involve minimal cost or inconvenience and don’t require any significant changes to your existing workflow.
One of the most important things that you can do is back up your photos to a cloud storage service. This will give you the peace of mind that, even if something happens to your computer or mobile device, you’ll be able to recover your photos. And there are a number of great cloud storage services available, from free options like Google Drive to paid options such as pCloud.
If you’re an iPhone or iPad user, iCloud is a great option for backing up your photos to the cloud. You can enable iCloud Photo Library in Settings on your phone or tablet, and then all of your photos will be uploaded to iCloud whenever you’re connected to Wi-Fi. You can then access your photos on any other device with iCloud Photo Library enabled, or on the web. Plus, if you delete a photo on your iPhone, it will also be deleted from iCloud, and it will no longer count towards your iCloud storage limit.
Another good option for backing up your photos to the cloud is Dropbox. It offers a free plan with 2GB of space, and you can purchase additional storage up to 2TB for a monthly fee. Dropbox syncs across Windows, macOS, and iOS, so you can easily access your photos from any of these devices. And it’s easy to organize your photos into folders and subfolders, making them easy to find.
If you’re looking for a more robust backup solution than cloud storage, a NAS is a great choice. A NAS is a network-attached storage device that allows you to connect multiple hard drives and store them in a central location. This makes it easy to access your photos from any of your devices, and it’s a great option if you want to keep your data off-site.
Back Up Your Photos to an External Hard Drive
Backing up your photos to an external hard drive is a good way to add redundancy to your backup strategy, and the Photostick is a good choice. This means that if one of your devices (computer, hard drives, cloud) fails, you still have the other copies of your photos. In addition, backing up to an external hard drive can help you save space by storing older photos on it, which can free up space on your computer and in the clouds.
There are several different ways to backup your photos to an external hard drive, but the best way is to use a NAS (network attached storage). A NAS is a piece of hardware that allows you to store and access data over a network. It’s similar to a traditional hard drive, but it has many advantages over traditional hard drives. For starters, it’s much faster, which means that you can transfer files to and from it more quickly. In addition, a NAS can support multiple hard drives, which gives you the option of using a RAID configuration to protect your data from failure.
To backup your photos to an external hard drive, first make sure that you have quit the Photos application on your computer. Then, open Finder and select the external hard drive where you want to store your Photos library. Drag the folder containing your Photos library to the external hard drive and wait for the transfer to complete. You should see a progress bar appear in the Finder window as the data is being copied over to the external hard drive.
Once the transfer is completed, you can eject the external hard drive and close the Finder window. Then, connect the external hard drive to your computer and open Finder again. You should see the copied Photos library appear in the sidebar or on your desktop.
If you’re ready to start protecting your images with a robust backup strategy, check out our eBook, Backup or Die. It’s full of helpful worksheets that will help you create a backup plan that fits your unique needs. And best of all, it’s the only backup workflow guide out there that has dragons!
Back Up Your Photos to a NAS
When it comes to backing up photos, you need more than just a couple of copies. You need a comprehensive backup solution that can offer you the kind of organized, dedicated archiving features that professional photographers use to safeguard their images. This is where NAS drives come in, with brands like Synology and QNAP offering more than just a hard drive that’s designed to store and preserve your data.
A NAS can serve multiple purposes, with the most important one being to help you back up your photos from your smartphone and computer automatically. This can be done via a NAS app that’s designed to back up files from various devices, or using a feature within the NAS itself. Either way, the advantage of backing up to a NAS is that it offers much more storage capacity than the average smartphone or computer.
That extra space can be used to create more backup copies of your photos if needed. That’s especially important since many of us are taking more photos now than we ever have before, resulting in vast libraries of digital files that can easily overwhelm the capacities of our computers and smartphones. If we only have a single copy of our photos, and something happens to that device, we’ll lose everything.
The other big reason to back up photos to a NAS is that it can offer an added level of security. As we all know, hard drive failure is a very real threat. Even more dangerous though is the possibility of a natural disaster or home fire, which can also wipe out your photos.
While most operating systems have a built-in backup tool, these tools are often limited in scope and don’t offer the kind of granular control and insight that professional users need. Plus, trying to upload all of your photos to a cloud service can quickly eat up your monthly bandwidth, which is not ideal.
By following the simple steps outlined in this guide, you can make sure that your photos are protected from all of the dangers that might threaten them. You’ll have three copies of your photos, stored on 3 different hard drives — with 1 of those drives stored offsite. That’s the best way to ensure that if something does go wrong, your photos are still safe and sound.
