One question people ask me is how do I ensure my photos are backed up and safe. As a photographer, I have dappled with this question a lot over the last 10 years and so here is what I do.

First I recommend two physical hard drives that back up the data you want to safe. These two hard drives should be exact duplicates of each other. The reason for having two is that if one accidentally drops or fails, you have a copy of that exact hard drive so everything can be retrieved from the other device. Memory nowadays is very affordable and below you will see which hard drives I personally use and love. You can choose which size you would like. I personally purchase the largest size as I take a lot of photographs over the year and want to back up all my raws as well as edited photos. For the average person who take a normal amount of photographs and videos, a 1 or 2 TB drive size is sufficient.

The second thing to use to ensure your memories are backed up is some sort of cloud backup. My personal favorite is Dropbox. It backs up all images on your computer and it is possible to access the images from any devices that have the dropbox app downloaded. When working remotely, this is super helpful as all my images and files are easily accessed via my phone. I’ve tried other cloud back up companies in the past but I love dropbox ease of use and the fact that all devices back up everything automatically.

One feature I particularly love about the dropbox application on mobile or tablet is that you can have your camera roll photos backed up. To do this, you have to run the app and it will upload all images and videos to your dropbox cloud. I usually do this once a month by running the application over night and in the morning the backup is complete.

Right now I have three devices: two main computers and a mobile device and all three are always in perfect sync. This allows me to access all files by any of the devices at any time.

I would love to hear from you. Let me know how you back up your images and what has worked well for you.

Are you curious about how I organize thousands of files? Let me know in the comments below and I can share my organizational filing techniques.