Watch Your Backup

Sunrise Gem, Diamond Beach, Iceland
Sony a7R V
Sony 12-24 GM
1/13 second
F/22
ISO 50

A funny thing happened to me on the way to this image. And when I say “on the way,” I don’t mean taking the picture, I mean after it was safely loaded onto my computer and fully processed, it seems that someone (who wishes to remain anonymous), accidentally overwrote it with a completely different image. Oops.

Establishing a backup mindset

Overwriting an image is an easy thing to do; without a backup, it’s lost forever. In this case, I still had the raw file, but I’d have lost all the time and effort I’d put into processing the image, with no guarantee that I’d ever perfectly duplicate my original processing. Not the end of the world, but a real pain. Instead, since I did have a backup, I was simply able to restore the image and go about my business.

Though whole experience was just a blip in my day, it made me think about the data management practices that made it a non-event. These data practices I acquired in my previous life in the tech industry (way back when megabytes were big), but practices that might not be quite so second nature to others (especially those who don’t yet know the devastation of lost irreplaceable data). Which led me to thinking that perhaps some would be interested knowing how I keep my data safe. So I’ll share my own image (and data) workflow as an example of good data practices—not to advocate for my specific approach, but simply as an example.

However you choose to implement your own backup scheme, you should be fine long as you follow a few basic principles:

• Backup everything that’s important: Duh.
• Backup regularly—Ideally that will be automatically and as instantly as possible: Your data is only as good as your most recent backup.
• Redundant backups: Relying on a single backup of important data is playing with fire, and I daresay even two backups might not be not enough.
• At least one offsite backup: You never know what catastrophe might befall your abode.
• Multiple storage types: There is no “perfect” storage technology, so whatever your preference—spinning drives (cheaper but prone to crashing without warning); SSD drives (faster, relatively crash-resistant, and extremely compact, but expensive and not forever); CDs/DVDs (cheap, but also not forever); or the cloud (convenient but slow to populate, and even slower to restore—especially if you need to restore a lot of data at once)—never put all your backup eggs in one basket.

I’m going to concentrate on my image storage and backup, but since photography is my livelihood, there’s lots of non-image data that’s just as important and treated with the same care.

To the extent that it’s possible, for me a regular backup means an immediate backup. Because all of my cameras have two card slots and I write each image I capture to both cards, my image backups start the second I click my shutter. Card failures are rare, and usually survivable with the help of recovery software, but usually isn’t good enough. Not only that, media failure isn’t the only threat to my images. Don’t forget user error. For example, I know a photographer (the same one who overwrote the image above) who one time pulled a card out of his camera intending to upload the images from a recent weekend in Yosemite, stuck it in a pocket for the short walk down to his nearby Starbucks, and somehow lost the card. Instead of freaking out about a lost weekend, he simply pulled the other card from his camera and used it to import the weekend’s images. The stray card never did turn up, so he was out the cost of its replacement—a temporary bummer, but far from the crushing letdown losing a weekend’s worth of irreplaceable photography would have been.

As much as I’d like to automate the step of importing my images from my camera to my computer, my own import workflow does require some intervention because I use Lightroom’s Import program to name and organize my images. Without getting too deep into the weeds, I let Lightroom rename each image—retaining the camera-assigned image number and adding descriptive info—before copying them into a trip-specific folder on a 4TB SSD drive that always travels with me. And because I use two computers, my Lightroom catalog also lives on this drive—I just plug the drive into whichever computer I’m working on and away I go.

Once this Lightroom upload is complete, I immediately copy that trip’s newly populated folder onto a 10TB spinning hard drive that lives on my desk, and also to a RAID 6 configured NAS array (a possibly overkill but much appreciated backup set-up by my IT professional son-in-law). Only when all this is done do I format the camera’s media cards.

That sounds pretty good—3 copies (computer, hard drive, NAS array)—but it’s not enough. Consider the plight of Francis Ford Coppola, who lost 15 years worth of writing and images when his computer and its backup were stolen. Then think about the unthinkable things that could happen to your home—theft, fire, flood, nuclear missile, etc.—that might jeopardize everything inside. You need an offsite backup.

Places to host an offsite backup(s) include the home of a friend or relative, a safe deposit box, a storage facility, the office, to name a few. All those options are better than nothing, but not only are these manually generated backups only as good as the most recent update, updating them frequently enough to be worthwhile requires more discipline than I can take credit for.

Which is why my offsite backup uses a cloud service: Backblaze. There are many cloud backup options, but I chose Backblaze because it’s computer-based (it backs up every hard drive attached to my computer for the same price), not size limited (they’ll backup as much data as I connect to my computer), and not expensive (around $100/year). Almost the instant I add images to the 10TB drive on my desk, Backblaze recognizes the new data and starts backing it up—I never have to think about it again. With so much redundancy in my local backups, I consider this Backblaze backup to be my backup of last resort—I’ll probably (fingers crossed) never use it, but the peace of mind I get from the knowledge of its existence is worth far more than the service’s relatively small cost.

A de facto backup (it does backup my data, but that’s not why use it) is Dropbox, which holds every piece of data I might want to access regularly—processed images (but not raw files), documents, presentations, etc.—and syncs it all between my various devices. This allows me to work on something at home, then relocate to my remote “office” (Starbucks) without skipping a beat. I can also access all this essential data on my iPhone and iPad if when I find myself separated from my computers. I actually sync all of my Dropbox data to each of my computers, so once its synced I can still access it when I’m off the grid (I’m looking at you, Grand Canyon North Rim); on my iPhone and iPad, I pull most of my Dropbox data from the cloud when I need it, but do have a few important folders and files permanently downloaded for offline access.

The final piece of my backup paradigm is Mac OS Time Machine, which comes installed on every Mac, stores history for each file (I can go back to any date and recover a copy of any given file on that date), and is so easy to set up and use, I don’t understand why any Mac user wouldn’t use it. My primary Time Machine backup is a dedicated (not used for anything else) 5TB spinning hard disk that lives on my desk and is always connected. Because spinning hard drives can fail without warning, I also have a duplicate Time Machine backup on my NAS array.

In this case, when I someone overwrote a this fully processed image file, I didn’t panic, I just went to my backup. I had multiple options, but my Time Machine backup was right there on my desktop, so in less than a minute I was back in business with a fully restored image file.

One more very specific case

No example illustrates how backup obsessed I am than my workflow on a trip that requires flying. Since I’ll be so far from my whole home office backup paradigm, when I fly I carry a second 4TB SSD drive. After uploading the images onto my regular image drive and into the Lightroom catalog, I copy that folder onto that second drive, and hide it deep in my suitcase. If, God forbid, someone breaks into my room and steals my (insured) camera and computer bags, it’s unlikely they’ll find the second backup drive.

When I fly home, I make sure my images are in three different places: the primary image drive is in my computer bag over my shoulder and then under the seat in front of me; the backup drive is safely tucked into my checked suitcase; the SD cards containing the original raw files are in my cameras, which are in my camera bag on my back, and then in the overhead bin. The only way I’ll lose all three is if the plane goes down, in which case I likely have bigger problems.

About this image

Sunrise Gem, Diamond Beach, Iceland

The day after our aborted visit to Diamond Beach, this year’s Iceland workshop group enjoyed a far more successful return visit. It seems every time Don Smith and I bring a group here, it’s a little different. Last year there was much less ice; the year before the surf was so rough that we didn’t dare get close to the water—and still ended up being too close. Some years the advancing and receding surf gently wraps each ice chunk, and other years most of the ice is high and dry.

This year the tide was out, so most (but not all) of the ice was up the beach and rarely touched by the surf. I started here trying to get the standard Diamond Beach motion blur shots on the few ice cubes the waves reached, but when the sun arrived turned my attention to the much larger ice slightly (20 feet) inland from the waves’ farthest approach.

I love the way the ice lights up with the warm hues of the sun’s first rays, so to fill the screen with this beautiful translucent natural ice sculpture, I went with my 12-24 lens, dropped low, and positioned my tripod no more than two feet away. Because I was going for a sunstar, I dialed to f/22, then spent the time waiting for the sun micro-positioning myself to get all the elements in place. I liked the smooth rocks embedded in the black sand, and though that distant block of ice in the upper left was quite tiny at 12mm, I knew as soon as the sun hit it, it would stand out enough to create a little visual interest in that corner of the frame. I put the top of my frame just above the clouds to minimize the amount of blank sky.

As soon as the sun popped out, I started shooting. On my camera’s LCD the foreground looked nearly black—not just the sand, but the shaded part of the ice as well. But I didn’t want to blow out the sky, and knew my Sony a7RV well enough to be confident I could pull up the shadows in Lightroom/Photoshop. I’d love to say that the feathery sun-kissed waves were intentional, but I didn’t even notice them until I started working on the image.

Don Smith and I return to Iceland in 2025

Here Comes the Sunstar

Click any image to scroll through the gallery LARGE

Golden Sunset, Lake Wakatipu, New Zealand

Sunrise Gem, Diamond Beach, Iceland

Daybreak, Wanaka Tree Sunstar, New Zealand

Sunstar and Reflection, Lake Wanaka, New Zealand

Day’s End on the Rim, Desert View, Grand Canyon

Beams of Gold, Desert View, Grand Canyon

Wildflowers and Sunstar, Mt. Adams, Columbia River Gorge

Bejewelled, Diamond Beach, Iceland

Autumn Glow, Cook’s Meadow, Yosemite

Morning Glory, Point Imperial Sunstar, Grand Canyon

Wildflowers and Mt. Hood, Columbia Hills State Park, Washington

Autumn Light, North Rim, Grand Canyon

Autumn Glow, Cook’s Meadow Sunstar, Yosemite

Sunbeam Reflection, Mono Lake, California

Sunstar, Little Colorado River, Grand Canyon

Sunstar, Horsetail Fall and El Capitan, Yosemite

Autumn Morning, Half Dome and Sunstar from Sentinel Bridge, Yosemite

Sunstar, Redwood Grove, Big Sur

Sunrise Sunstar, Grandview Point, Grand Canyon

Grand Canyon Sunset, Hopi Point, Grand Canyon

Glisten, Diamond Beach, Iceland

Last Light, Lake Wakatipu from Glenorchy Road, New Zealand

Bamboo Sunstar, Maui, Hawaii

New Day, Mono Lake

Yosemite Falls Sunstar, Yosemite

Sunstar, Horseshoe Bend, Arizona

Here Comes the Sun, Mather Point, Grand Canyon