One of my long-time clients recently messaged me to say she was printing a bunch of her family’s past sessions (yay! print those photos!) but couldn’t find her photos from a session three or four years ago and did I still have them.

Y’all.

This happens every single year.

I’ve fortunately been able to help these clients out because I’ve invested in a long-term back-up system. But that wasn’t always the case. My own hard-drive failure, data loss, and (only partial) data recovery taught me an expensive lesson.

So I’ve FINALLY finished this post that’s been sitting in my draft folder since 2018. A lesson I hope y’all can avoid with these tips.

Print ‘em.

First, a friendly reminder to not let those digital images you’ve invested time and money into collect dust on your computer. Put ‘em on your wall or in an album or simply propped on your desk. Take advantage of your gallery print shop after you have a session with me; it’s full of high-quality, beautiful print products from professional labs.

Just create something tangible you can hold. You won’t regret it, I promise.

And if you have any really important photos, like from your wedding day, make sure they are stored properly. Here’s a great article from the National Archives that spells it all out, but a few highlights are:

• Store items at a low temperature and a low relative humidity.

• Use a storage box made of board or folder stock that is lignin-free and acid-free or buffered.

• Reduce the risk of damage from water, insects, and rodents by not storing items in damp basements, garages, and hot attics, and keep the away from sources of leaks and floods, such as pipes, windows, or known roof leaks.

• Store items on a shelf so they don’t get wet during a flood, and away from food and water which are attractive to insects and rodents.

• When storing photographs and other important paper memories, avoid materials that can cause physical damage, will discolor over time, ooze from the edges, or will be difficult to remove in the future including adhesives and glues like rubber cement, hot glue, or synthetic white glue.

While printing your photos doesn’t mean they will last forever (nothing really does), various print products can last a whole helluva lot longer than on a computer hard drive, USB, or disc.

Back up to the cloud.

I used to give clients discs or thumb drives rather than digital downloads, but technology not only changes (who has a disc drive anymore?), it will also fail. It’s only a matter of time. So you can’t rely solely on those sorts of devices. You must do more.

Ideally, you should have 2-3 types of storage. Sure, one could be a USB drive, disc or hard-drive copy, but one of them should definitely be cloud storage. It’s part of my back-up system and has given me a lot of peace of mind.

There are several options out there, Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, but I use Backblaze, which among other things, is automatic, has unlimited storage, and unlimited file size, which for a photographer with a lot of big files, are huge features to have standard. Not to mention, it’s very affordable at about $60/yr. Check ‘em out and if you sign up with this link we both get a free month!

No matter who decide to go with, take some time to do a little research, know what their terms and conditions are, and how things are handled in case of failure.

Another great tip I’ve heard is to make two copies: one to work from on your computer, and another one stored in the cloud and don’t touch. This way no matter what happens, everything will still be there when you need it. 

Many image sharing and print sites, like Flickr or Artifact Uprising, allow you to store photos as well print and share them, but I’d suggest this as your ‘Plan C’ for your most precious photos. Besides less robust storage size, there are no guarantees start-ups and smaller companies will have the staying power of the big guys.

And at least once a year, don’t forget to make sure to review your back-up system, check and see if everything is running as it should, that the company is afloat, and that terms haven’t changed.

Like I said in the beginning, I’ve suffered the wrath of technology’s fickle nature, so don’t put this off any longer. Don’t end up sad, mad, and regretful like me. Enjoy the ease and peace of mind cloud storage can give you.