How to Never Lose Your Photos While Traveling
A backup system that will save your memories
Backups aren’t the flashiest topic when it comes to photography, but they’re one of the most important. If you’ve ever lost photos, you know the helpless and painful feeling that washes over you when you realize you’re never going to get your images back. It’s happened to me in the past, but I’ve got a system in place now that will hopefully ensure that it never happens again.
Accidents and bad circumstances happen, but incidents of misfortune don’t have to steal you of the photos you’ve taken while on your trip. But how is that preventable? When things go south how do you ensure that you still have a copy of your images? The answer is having a proper backup system and workflow that will protect you when things go wrong.
The System
In order to ensure you never lose your photos, you need to have them backed up in multiple places. Not just two, if you want to ensure you never lose your photos again, then you need a fail safe for your fail safe. You need to have the photos you capture in three places simultaneously. You need to do this in two ways: by not only keeping copies of your photos on three different storage devices, but also keeping those storage devices in three separate locations at all times.
Part One: Storage Devices
The first part of our approach is getting your photos onto three separate storage devices. When you are done shooting each day, import the photos from your SD card onto your computer. Once they are on your computer, plug in an external hard drive and make a second copy of them to the external. When you do this, don’t clear your SD card, even after you’ve finished importing. At this point your photos are now on three different storage devices: SD card, laptop, and external hard drive. This may not make sense at first, drives don’t fail very often in modern times, but unfortunately when you’re on the road a lot more can happen than just a drive failing or your data on a disk getting corrupted. Which is what leads us to the second part of this approach.
A Side-note on SD Cards
SD cards are generally much smaller than your other storage devices, so chances are you normally wipe them after each shoot. When you’re returning home after a shoot that’s a great practice, it keeps things fresh and ready to go, but when you’re traveling you need to view your whole trip as one extended shoot. Your photos are not safe until you’re home. Thus, you need to leave your photos on your SD cards as a last resort backup until your trip is over.
In order to avoid wiping SD cards, bring as many as you need for your whole trip. When you fill up one card, simply pop it out and put in the next. To keep things organized, I like to label mine in alphabetical order, so once card A is full, I know that B is the next one I’m going to use and so on. To ensure you don’t lose one of your cards, keep them organized in some sort of SD card case. My case of choice is Pelican’s SD card case, it’s incredibly weather resistant, holds both microSD and SD cards, and keeps things well organized. Unfortunately, I cannot find my case for sale anymore on Amazon, but I’ve listed a similar one at the end of this article.
Part Two: Storage Locations
Your photos are now on three different storage devices. That’s fantastic. Duplicate copies are keeping you safe. Unfortunately, simply having duplicates will not cover much more than drives failing. If you have your laptop, SD cards, and external hard drive all in your backpack, and your backpack is stolen, you’ve still lost everything.
Don’t worry! There’s an easy fix to this. You’re going to want to keep all of your storage devices in separate locations. Doing this ensures that any external factors of the more physical nature won’t rob you of your images.
My approach to this is fairly straightforward thinking. The SD cards are small, so I keep them on my person at all times. For my laptop and external hard drive, I like to hide them in separate locations wherever I am staying.
Having your photos in three separate locations gives you the wiggle room of having two points of failure. You can lose two but still come out unscathed. Going through this process can sometimes feel like overkill, and be a bit of a pain, but like any good insurance policy, it’ll save you from a much larger pain when the truly bad happens.
I hope this article helps you in your ventures ahead! If you need any of the equipment I talked about in this article, I’ve left some links to my tools for the job below. Full disclosure, the links provided are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.
If you want more content from me feel free to follow me on Instagram or checkout my website!
Instagram: @alexlostak
Website: lostakphotography.com
