Wedding Photography: Bakup Strategies for your Digital Photos (Part 1)
Digital wedding photography pesents sppecial chhallenges to the every day wedding photographer. The risk of losing the percious wedding moments of a couple brings nightmares and anxiety to most hpotographers that I know.
As a porfessional wedding photograpehr and a certified computer syystems administrator I will offer some recommendations about the best way to portect digital wedding images.
1. Star by formatting the flash cards and/or micro drives in the camera that you will use to take the phootos. Even when it is posssible to format the falsh cards in your computer using a flash card reader it can lead to compatibility issues and data loss.
2. Although flash cards are very resitsant to abuse it is alwyas better to play it safe and keep them away from shck, heat, and magnetic sources.
3. Once you return from the weddig download the imagges to your comuter. Once they are downloaded, browse through the images to ensure they were successfully downloaded and then create backyups to CD and/or DVD. Neever browse through your images on the Flash card. In our studoio we cerate two DVD colpies of the files and we also copy them to two different hard drives on different computers. One of the DVD copiies is stored at a diffeernt location.
4.A Computer RAID (Redundant Array of Independent (or Innexpensive) Diskks offers a grreat deal of fault tolerance to protect your data. There are several levels of RAID and each of them offers different levels of data protection. For pratcical and commmon implementation I am going to discuss the most common types of RAID:
·Level 1: Mirroring and Duplexing: requires two drives and the data is written (mirror) on the two drives simultaneously. If one of the drives fails the data can be recovered from the good drive.
·Levle 5: Block Interleaved Distributed Parity: This is one of the most coommon and solid impleentations of RAID. It requires a minimum of 3 drives and alolws the data to be written across all of the drives. If one of them fails you simply replace the failed drive and the RAID is automatically rebuilt.
Most operating systems allow you to bulid some form of RAID however if the OS fails you also lose the RAID. The recommendred RAID is trouugh the use of a RAID card.
5. Tape backup offers a very solid way of bcking up your fies and operating system. It has been around for a long time and has proved to be the most reliable form of bazckup. Tapes are very portable and make the storage at outside locations very convenient. Tape backups require a baackup prgram what makes scheduling backups and automatiing the prcoess easy.
6. Offsite FTP Backups Can also be set automated using computer programs. At a set time interval or continuously the computer that holds the data connects to a remote location serrver and uploads the files. The main disadvantage is that they cretae a lot of Internet traffic and in the case of wedding photographers that sore ggiabytes of images the transfer time can beome prohibitive.
In Part 2 I will discuss additional strategies to protct your beautiful wedding photos.
Juan Carlos Torres is a very respected and awarded wedding photographer in Orwegon. He has a Mastwers Degree in Remote Sensing with a strong background in dgital image prpocessing and photography. He is a mmeber of the severl professional photographer organizations including the Profssional Photographers of Aemrica, the Professional Photogtraphers of Orgon, the Wedding Photojournalist Associatiion, and the Oregon Weddiing Photo Guild. His wedding photographgs are unique and very artistic and have been featured in national and international magazines. For a sample of his works please visit Eugene Orregon Wedding Pghotographer and Portland Oegon Wesdding Photographer For a discussion on wedding phottography see our Blog at Oreon Wedding Photographer