Why a quality photography backup workflow is so important

The Workflows Photography Podcast

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In this episode of Workflows, host Scott Wyden Kivowitz shares his personal experiences of losing his precious photos not once, but three times. These stories serve as lessons on the importance of having a quality photography backup workflow in place. From his camera's memory cards being corrupted to an external drive crash, Scott learned the hard way about the significance of safeguarding his images. Join him as he reveals the steps he took to improve his backup workflow and how he ensures the safety of his photos today.

Key Lessons:

1. Travel Backups: If traveling, backup your memory card to multiple places before returning home. Scott's experience with incompatible memory cards highlights the importance of selecting devices and types less vulnerable to corruption, ensuring the safety of your photos.

2. Invest in multiple backups: Losing all his band photographs due to a single external drive failure taught Scott the lesson of investing in backups. Having multiple physical and cloud backups is crucial to protect your images from permanent loss.

3. Develop a cloning system: Scott's backup workflow involves cloning his local drive to an identical RAID drive, which is then cloned to an offsite location. This system ensures redundancy and safeguards against hardware failures or disasters.

4. Utilize backup software: Using reliable backup software, like Carbon Copy Cloner, can simplify the cloning process and ensure that all your files and external drives are backed up consistently.

5. Combine high-resolution and low-resolution backups: Incorporating software like Imagen allows you to have high-resolution backups of your RAW files while also saving storage space by having low-resolution JPEG backups. This provides flexibility for editing, culling, and preserving your images.

Join the Imagen Community and share your own disaster stories and current backup workflows. Learn from each other's experiences and enhance your photography backup workflows.

• (00:00) - 025
• (01:10) - A mistake I couldn't avoid
• (02:54) - This mistake was totally my fault
• (04:15) - I hope you never make this mistake
• (05:20) - My photography backup workflow