How’s your storage baby?
Things to ask your photographer : A series :
Are you external, internal, NAS, RAID 0-6, cloud, physical, offsite; one, two or three copies?
There, that’s the question.
No really, backup storage for your photographer is all in that (poorly worded) question.
When you pay your photographer to document for you, say like a wedding, event, or even “simple” family photographs, you want to know that the files will be handled safely.
That’s where the 3-2-1 rule comes in. You, and your photographer should have three copies of files, in two separate mediums with one in another location.
So what does that look like during and after a photo shoot? Ideally your photographer should have a dual memory slot camera. Be aware that some cameras that many photographers own and just might use with your event only come with one memory card slot. If having a back-up being made in real time is important to you discuss with your photographer.
Starting with the three copies, there are many configurations this can take but a common way is; one copy on a memory card, one copy as the working files and one copy backed up either before or after editing of either all the files or all the delivered files. Once the backup is made often the memory card is formatted and another backup is made again.
Next is the two different mediums. This may look like a NAS or RAID setup in your photographers office. It might even be a shoe-box full of external hard drives labeled by date. Mostly having two medium is about minimizing the chances of storage failure by having files not be neighbors on your photographers computer in case their house is hit by lightning.
Now probably the most important part of the storage rule is having one copy offsite. Doing this is probably the hardest for some photographers because either they need to squirrel away hard drives in a safe deposit box or pay for a cloud service to backup their backups. And paying for another monthly service as a photographer can add up.
So in conclusion ask your photographer how they handle their backups and make sure you have backups of the files you paid for as well. Here is where I would put my affiliate link to one of the many google-able services. 😉
