www.sharonarnoldi.com

This is our old blog, visit us over at www.sharonarnoldi.com/blog ... Sharon Arnoldi is a Colorado mountain family photographer  


    


How To Backup Your Images

Recently I've been asked by quite a few people what I use to backup my libraries of photos.  In reality I use multiple solutions, not just one.  I have 4 TB of storage on my main computer, 3 External Hard drives, Online Cloud Storage & I store DVDs of images at an off site location. 

Sound excessive? Its not. Mechanical hard disks WILL fail.  If you don't store anything off-site, what happens if your studio/house burns down or gets broken into? I don't ever want to have to explain to a client why I lost their images.

Here's the breakdown of my plan:

After I shoot, I do not erase my memory card until the images are downloaded to my computer and backed up to an external hard drive / indestructible thumbdrive.  If I am backlogged  - I might dump all the images onto Wuala (cloud storage)  just for safe keeping.  If I am not backlogged the images will get culled, edited and uploaded to Pictage as soon as possible.  Pictage provides a lifetime backup of your images - once I get my images to Pictage I feel much better, until then I can backup 80 GB onto my waterproof / fireproof USB thumb drives - made by LaCIE available on Amazon.com.


SERVICES I USE:

Wuala - (Cloud Storage) For Backup of shoots in 1 calendar year - this also gives me access to files from anywhere so if I go on travel and want to work on images & I forgot to transfer them to my laptop I have access.  Pretty sweet service. Its free to sign up and my referral link gives you an extra 1 GB free
( http://www.wuala.com/referral/33PMK55K5H66FK3JMHAJ)

Pictage -  (Cloud Storage) - Lifetime backup of all images uploaded into system.  Monthly fee to use Pictage.

Local & External Hard Drive Space: I use my computer to store 2-3 yrs of the most recent images, Raw & JPG files.  My external hard drive is an exact replica. I have a thing for LaCIE hard drives - some people hate them but I have had great success with them.

DVDs / Solid State Storage - At the end of each year I backup all shoots and mail them off to my parents house, boring I know and time consuming.  I'm waiting for solid state hard drives to become cheap then I will just have one for every year and mail it off.  Key to solid state hard drives are - no moving parts, yes they can still fail but failure is less likely.

So there you have it: for me to lose all my images: my house, my parents house, Pictage & Wuala would all have to crash at the same time - whats the probability in that?

Highlands Ranch Photographer {Newborn Twins}

Lainey & Parker at five weeks old! Mom & Dad are lucky to have such beautiful babies.  They were lots of fun to work with.  We were able to capture wonderful photos of each of them during the first shoot, but they were WIDE awake so it was really difficult to get a picture of them together without someone smacking the other with an arm or leg.  On the second day, brother was cooperative and sleepy and sister was wide awake but content!  In the end, it was all a success.  Watch their slideshow to see some of the outtakes, still super cute!






Miner Family Portraits at DeKoevend Park

When I arrived at DeKoevend Park for this family portrait session the temperature was 50 degrees, it was bright and sunny (and warm) I even took my coat off during the first half of the shoot.  But something happened while we were there and the temperature dropped almost 20 degrees - when I left my car said it was 32 degrees outside!!!  Poor miss Charlotte got mighty cold by the time we finished.



We also photographed her 4 - legged friends: