I JUST LOST ALL MY PHOTOS!!

I hear those words from fellow photographers more often than I like and it just makes my stomach drop. I know from my own past experiences that it is a terrible feeling to realize you just made a mistake or suffered an accident that wiped out even just one photo. Many years ago I put in place a system that has served me well and I want to share it with you here.

The Strategy

In the field I shoot with a camera that has two card slots. I shoot RAW simultaneous to both cards. I use a pair of larger, 128GB, or 256GB cards in my camera. I always try to use the same size in both slots to keep this as simple as possible.

If you have a camera with only one slot I do recommend you shoot RAW + JPEG as JPEG files can be easier to recover from a corrupted card or in case of accidental formatting.

I rarely fill the larger cards in a single day of shooting and on most trips cards these sizes will last me several days. Each evening I download (copy) the photos from the camera to my working drive and use Lightroom's backup on Import tool to make a second copy of those files to a second drive. So, on day 3 of the trip, I have all the photos I captured so far with me still in the camera and all the photos from the previous days on the working drive and on the backup drive. This means that all of these photos exist in THREE places and the working drive and backup drive stay separated in the hotel room. When I do fill the pair of cards I remove them from the camera and place them together face down in my card wallet. They will NOT get used again during the trip. A new pair of freshly formatted cards are inserted and the process continues. The card wallet remains with me in a safe location in the camera bag - it is either tethered to the camera bag or it is in a smaller zippered pouch that stays closed at all times.

At the end of the trip, I have a handful of used cards upside down in my wallet. These will NOT get used or formatted until all home backups have been completed.

If a flight home is involved my working drive stays with me in my camera bag, and my backup drive ( I make sure I have a complete backup of all photos before traveling home and a backup of the Lightroom catalog) goes in my checked luggage.

Once home I give myself a few days to finish deleting the junk images and other rejects and then I run the sync software that copies everything new on my working drive and places it on a BIG hard drive in my office. That big hard drive in my office is connected to the online backup service Backblaze (get 1 month free with that link) which will then automatically upload those files to their cloud service. I have fast upload speeds so that usually takes less than a couple of days.

As I prepare for my next trip or shoot I will check online to see that the backup has been completed before I start to format cards or wipe the travel backup drive. Occasionally I will need to use my cards before the backup has been completed or on trips where I shoot lots of videos I might fill enough cards that I have to reuse some while traveling. I will only reuse ONE of the pair of cards - never both. The working drive and backup drive that I travel with are large enough to use for a full year of photos.

Some of you have cameras that require a very expensive card in one slot and you probably don't want to buy multiple cards that expensive. I understand and recommend that you just switch out the second card (the more affordable SD card) when the pair is full and reuse the expensive card but you need to be 100% sure that you are writing to both cards and this is only after you have imported and backed up your photos on the two separate drives.

Recommended Gear - 

SanDisk SSD drives are my working and backup drives while traveling. These small solid drives are extremely rugged and lightweight making it easy to always bring them along.  I use the 2TB size and use the newer fast V2 for my working drive and the older 2TB for my backup drive.

• Working Drive - SanDisk 2TB Extreme Portable SSD V2 [Amazon Link] [B&H Photo Link]

• Backup Drive - SanDisk 2TB Portable SSD [Amazon Link] [B&H Photo no longer sells the slower drives]

Feel free to buy two of the slower and more affordable drives as both your working and backup, just be sure to clearly label them.

For the larger backup drive at home, I recommend WD 10TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive [Amazon Link] [B&H Photo Link]

Note that this is a slower drive and works best as a backup drive, not a working drive.  I use the 2TB SSD as my working drive even when home. 

Need more SD Cards? I recommend SanDisk 128GB [Amazon Link] [B&H Photo Link]  or the faster ProGrade Cards in 128GB [Amazon Link] [B&H Photo Link] (x2 to save $)

The Card Wallet I use - Think Tank Pixel Rocket [Amazon Link] [B&H Link] I like the orange one - just that much easier to find in a camera bag.