Redundancy

“Hope for the best and be prepared for the worst.” – Maya Angelou

There are a few ways I try to safeguard my equipment and images from theft and failure.

1. Equipment

I keep a main camera body and main lens and bring a backup body and lens to every shoot. I have a second backup (third camera) that I keep at home. I’ve had a shutter fail on me mid-shoot, so I consider having alternates at every shoot mandatory.

My cameras (D850) have dual slots for XQD and SD cards. I have every image written to both cards in case of corruption.

As for memory cards and batteries, I keep them both in my camera suitcase AND my camera bag so that if one bag were to be stolen, I still have memory cards and batteries available.

After a session, if I go out to dinner I bring my camera with me. If I can’t bring my camera, then I bring both of my memory cards from the session. If my car is broken into, I don’t want to lose the images that I just took and didn’t have time to back up yet.

2. Images

My RAW images are backed up to an external hard drive that is also backed up in the cloud by BackBlaze. I do not reformat my memory cards until after the session is delivered.

Final images are stored on 2 external hard drives that are backed to the cloud via BackBlaze, and stored in the cloud via my hosting site (PixieSet and Pic-Time).

I don’t want to rely entirely on physical drives in the case of theft, fire, or corruption. But I don’t want to rely entirely on the cloud in case those companies go out of business.