How often are you backing up your photos?

Personally I'm the type that will back up my photos when I get around to it. More like when I finally think about it.

I have friends that back up pretty much any time they add new photos, then I know people who rarely back up photos.

Which are you?

I'm pretty much backing things up every couple weeks or so. I need to look into that software that does it automatically when ever something changes on computer.

"Time Machine" backs up my Mac HD every hour. But w/photos, that's not good enough for me. I'll run backup as soon as I load anything new. Suffer an irreparable mechanical hard drive failure once and you tend to get paranoid 'bout such things.

Constantly. Client work is backed up immediately upon upload. I'm sometimes a bit more casual with personal work, but I don't see any point in waiting.

I have one automated backup that runs I believe every 3 hours and another that is once per day or so. And I'm not a professional - just personal files.

Every three years, whether I need to or not....
Honestly, if I were doing it professionally, I would do it with every action..i.e. when I download files to computer, also to a external HD.
I now back up images when I feel like it, being retired and just an enthusiast gives me a license to be lazy...

We back ours up weekly.

I have a seagate 1tb hard drive and it has the program that I was able to tell it to backup the hard drive and it tells me if there are new files that are on my computer that haven't been backed up yet and I usually plug the hard drive into my computer once a week or so and it automatically keeps everything backed up

As I said previously, "Time Machine" backs me up automatically at a set interval. Today I experienced the real value of that. Nothing to do with a hardware malfunction; I simply screwed up. I saw a possibly interesting image in a very tight crop of a photo that I had already edited. So I edited the edit ... and liked what i saw ... and, without thinking, saved it ...WITH THE SAME FILE NAME. So of course my original xxxx-edited-1 is gone.

But wait, it's not really gone; I've got back-up. Launched "Time Machine," went back about 1-1/2 hours, found the original file, clicked "restore," clicked "yes I really do want to save both files with the same name." And bingo, xxxx-edited-1(original) is back!

Back-up often guys. It can save you from being your own worst enemy.

Every time I upload new photos

I keep the originals on my memory cards and a copy on my HDD. When I get low on memory cards I backup the hard drive to an external. I can then format the memory cards while still having redundant copies of everything. Once a month or so seems to be the cycle. Be fore purging anything off the computer drive I run a second backup on my other external drive which goes in the safe.

Whenever the spirit moves me to do so. I have to 1 tb drives, so I back up on the slave. Then every once in awhile I back up on my 500 gig removable drive which is stored in a fire proof safe rated for electronic storage, and ammunition as well.

One thing I do is store everything on external hard drives now... unfortunately, I did have one EHD that crashed on my completely... That was my original back-up drive that did back-ups automatically and when it crashed, I actually lost a few years worth of photos and videos.

I have not brought it anywhere to see if anything can be recovered... One of these days,I will try that.

Like I said, everything I download off the camera goes direct to an EHD. May start to do back-ups to the Cloud just to be safe.

I copy my files from the memory cards to the computer's 'main' drive when I get back from a gig. Then the cards get labeled go into a safe place where they are not touched again until the job is done and delivered.
After the copy onto the 'main' drive is done, I do another copy to the 'working' drive on the same computer. I then do a copy to external hard drive (EHD) A and an additional copy to EHD 'B'. The active externals contain roughly my last 15 commissions,or however many fit with plenty of room to spare (once I no longer have room, the oldest get moved to an archive dataset on it's own set of EHD's). I then go to bed with one of the external drives in my bedroom.

The following day I take both external hard drives to off-site location Y and Z where I drop off EHD A at Y and EHD B at Z... while there I pick up EHD C and EHD D. I then head back and make a copy of the gig to EHD C and D and put them on my shelf (NOT connected to anything - lightening will fry a EHD just as easily as your main computer! I dont' believe that a hard drive connected to your computer is really a 'backup'...no matter how many copies you have on it (ie: time machine) ). I then start work on the commission using the files on the 'working' drive, with nightly backups of the lightroom catalog (one catalog per gig) and any PSD's generated (that wouldn't have been in the intial backup of the RAWs) to the 'main' drive.

When the images are done I export the JPGs to the jobs directory (which contains everything about the job - RAWs, LRCAT, JPGs, webAlbum, etc). When done the full-resolution JPGs get uploaded to the cloud and the entire job folder gets moved off the working (wicked fast, but small) drives and replaces what was on the 'main' drive. From there, the folder gets copied to the 2 local externals (and to the two off-site ones next time they come back). The job then gets shown and delivered to the client. When I get back the "A-okay" I then go to the CF cards, format them, and put them back into the rotation for use.

Roughly a year later, I go back and delete all RAW images that didn't make the cut (I hold onto them in case something happens and the client goes "Do you have a shot of....").

It is unacceptable to lose a wedding image. I might lose a few days of work, but I'll be damned sure I'm not going to lose an irreplaceable image.

I have it set up to back up daily