I’ve just read a very sad blog post from a bride whose photographer lost most of her wedding photos – their hard drives fell to the floor and very few photos could be retrieved from either of them. ( You can read it here if you like.) I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to tell a bride and groom that. It’s definitely something that I never want to have to do, so I want to assure my clients that I do everything I can to reduce the chances of it ever happening with the photos I take. Here’s what I do to look after your precious wedding images and minimise the risk of losing them due to hard disk failure, fire or theft:
On your wedding day
- Both my assistant and I change memory cards regularly so your photos are recorded on several cards across the day to minimise the risk of losing all your images due to card failure.
- Both my main cameras take two memory cards so I configure them to write to both cards at the same time, which means I have duplicates of the images I take if one of the cards fails.
- As soon as I get home that night, I upload your images to my main hard drive.
- Once they’re all uploaded, I safely lock the memory cards away.
- When I go to bed, I leave my computer backing up your photos to a second hard drive.
- My automatic cloud backup uploads them to an offsite location.
The following day and afterwards
- The second hard drive, which now has duplicate copies of your wedding photos, gets moved to another location in our house.
- The other memory cards stay with me when I go out of the house. I don’t erase these cards until I’ve edited your wedding photos and uploaded the edited images to a second cloud backup location.
- My main computer and discs run off a UPS (uninterruptable power supply) so if there’s a power cut while I’m working on it, it minimises the chances of my photos getting corrupted.
So, as soon as possible after your big day, I have multiple copies of your images stored in multiple locations.
Once you’ve received your image files
I keep the originals files from the camera for a month afterwards and I keep copies of the edited images for a year after your wedding. So once you’ve received your image files on disc or USB stick, make sure you take backup copies of them.