One of the worst things that can happen as a photographer is losing your image files or your gear.
Unfortunately, it’s a much more common occurrence than you might think. That’s because there are many different ways your images, camera, lenses, and other things could be damaged, lost, or corrupted.
In this quick guide, I offer a few tips on how to protect your images and gear from loss and ensure that your all-important files are safe and secure.
Get Photography Insurance
Photography insurance is really not an option. Instead, it’s an essential component of building a strong, healthy, and successful business.
Aside from the peace of mind that having the proper photography insurance gives you, it’s also a practical tool for helping protect the investment you’ve made in your business.
Though you certainly hope that your gear isn’t damaged by a fire or flood, a windstorm or lighting, it can - and does - happen. Look at Hurricane Maria or the recent fires in California! And when natural disasters (or manmade disasters like acts of terrorism) occur, you need to have the right insurance in your corner to help replace your gear quickly and get back to work.
When shopping for photography insurance, be sure to do your due diligence.
You don’t want a cut-rate policy that has a lot of holes in it. Instead, get complete equipment coverage from a reputable company like Athos Insurance Services.
Their equipment policy protects you in all sorts of situations - smoke damage from a fire in your studio, a camera that’s damaged due to falling objects from an earthquake, loss of your gear during transit or shipping, and theft as well.
Better still, Athos Insurance Services offers worldwide coverage, so you don’t have to worry about something happening to your gear whether you’re at home or abroad.
Likewise, this policy offers replacement cost coverage, so your lost, stolen, or damaged gear is valued in today’s dollars, not what you paid for it at the time of purchase. Talk about peace of mind!
Having a photography business without having photography insurance is simply asking for trouble. If you’ve put off getting insured because you think you don’t have the time or money to do so, visit Athos Insurance Services to see how quick, easy, and affordable photography insurance can be.
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Get in the Habit of Backing Up Images Immediately
Though this might seem like a “duh” piece of advice, you might be surprised how many photographers lose their images because they don’t back them up in time.
Think about it - how often do you go out on a photo shoot, fill up a card or two, and then slide them into your card wallet to dump them onto your computer later on? I do it all the time, and though I’ve never experienced the trauma of losing a memory card or having one go bad with all my images on it, those eventualities happen to photographers all the time.
Waiting the rest of the day, two days, three days, or longer to back up your images is just not a good idea. The longer you wait to back them up, the higher the chances are that something will go awry and your images will be lost.
What’s more, what if your workspace is flooded or damaged by fire and your memory cards are damaged beyond repair? What if your camera - and the memory card inside - is stolen from your unlocked vehicle? What if you spill your coffee on your card reader?
Though having equipment insurance can help protect you from lost, stolen, or damaged gear, it won’t bring all those lost images back.
So, likely the simplest thing you can do to protect your images is to back them up and do so quickly.
I personally use a Synology DS918 network attached storage system to store all my photos and videos.
It's a big rig - it's got four drive bays and can accommodate up to 48TB of data - so it's a much easier and cleaner way of storing my files (as opposed to having a handful of external drives laying around.
It's small enough to sit on my desk, and is pretty easy on the eyes with its matte black finish.
But this thing isn't about looking good - it's about performance and security.
You can create over 2,000 different accounts on the DS918 and have up to 1,000 simultaneous connections.
It's got a 1.5GHz Intel Celeron quad-core processor that can dial it up to 2.3GHz when needed, 4GB of 1866 MHz DDR3L Ram (which can be expanded to 8GB), and can achieve encrypted sequential read speeds of up to 225MB per second and encrypted sequential write speeds up of to 221MB per second.
Best of all, it's easy to use with a Linux-based operating system and intuitive control panel that allows people with little or no networked storage experience to get things up and running.
If you want the ultimate in photo storage and backup, look no further than the Synology DiskStation DS918+.
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Create an Archive of Your Digital Image Files
Though archiving your images might sound a lot like backing up your images, it’s actually a bit of a different process.
Where backing up your images is more of a short-term process, archiving your images is a long-term solution for protecting and organizing your digital image files.
That is, if you’re like me, you probably have multiple computers, hard drives, thumb drives, and cloud accounts where you’ve stored your images. That can make it extremely difficult to remember what files are saved where.
That’s where archiving comes in.
When developing an archive of your photos, it’s important to organize them first. Give each image descriptive name files so you know what they are without having to even see the image. Also tag photos with descriptors like who or what the image is of. Then create an inventory list of each image you’ve saved in that particular drive or account.
It’s tedious work, to be sure. But getting into the habit of describing each image and maintaining an inventory will make it a much easier task to find the images you’re looking for down the road.
Additionally, the National Archives recommends saving each image in at least two different places for protective purposes. They also recommend creating new media copies every five years. The reason for this is twofold: one, to protect yourself from data loss, and two, to accommodate potential new technologies for data storage. After all, that external hard drive you bought in college isn’t going to last forever!
Learn More:
- Why Photography is a Financially Risky Business
- Photography Business Tip: How to Strike a Better Balance Between Work and Life