How Almost Losing My Entire Photo Archive Nearly Stopped My Next Book
As a photographer, I have a lot of photos. Not just everyday snapshots, but the original RAW files too. These are large, high-quality digital negatives that swallow up far more space than a JPEG (standard image) ever could.
I used to think I was good at backing things up.
In fact, I felt fairly smug about it.
But in 2023, during Storm Babet, I nearly lost everything.
That flood didn’t just sweep through my flat and ruin most of my possessions. It came close to swallowing up my photo archives too. The water lapped at the feet of my desktop computer and external hard drive, both perched on the same desk. Both sat in the same flat. Both dangerously close to being destroyed in one night.
Out of that disaster came my first LumiNovel, Through Water & Ruin — you can get your copy here. It contains the fully story of what happened including more than 50 photos like the one above!
At the time, I didn’t give much thought to what almost happened. I was too busy dealing with the aftermath. But fast-forward a couple of years, and the reality hit me — I had almost lost all my photos.
Part of the problem was false confidence. I was using an online cloud storage service. However due to the sheer size of my collection it struggled somewhat and occasionally experienced errors. Over the years I’ve had to reset this a few times. I won’t bore you with the technical details here. For most people I think could storage is great, as long as you are happy with having your photos stored on a companies server in a building somewhere. I don’t think these services are necessarily geared towards photographers though.
I did end up fixing my online cloud storage service, however it got me thinking:
How would I feel if I lost all the photos tomorrow?
After realising that this would be devastating I started to wonder what other people do. How do they back up important things in a way that is reliable and ensures that even if your house is flooded you are covered?
This is especially important to me now, as I’m working on my second LumiNovel, My Journey Into Portraiture. It draws on photos spanning more than a decade of my life. The thought that I could have lost most of that work to a flood, or to a fifteen-year-old computer giving up one day, still makes me feel sick.
But it’s not just professional photographers who should care about this. Everyone has photographs they would be devastated to lose. Those wedding photos. Those holiday snaps. Those messy family pictures from when the kids were small.
“I’m safe, it’s in the cloud,” you might say. Are you? Really? I’ve known people who lost access to their cloud accounts and never got it back. I’ve known people who quietly hit their storage limit without realising, only to find out nothing had been backed up for months.
3 - 2 - 1 Backup Method
This is how I learnt about the 3-2-1 backup method. It’s a simple rule that ensures you are converted should the worst events occur:
3 copies of your data
2 different Storage Types
1 copy kept in a different geographical location
Now this rule has been around for awhile. And there is some different interpretation of the second point. For example in its truest sense you should have a copy on a hard drive and one on an optical disk like a DVD. Or perhaps one solid state drive and one on a CD. Nowadays though I think people have relaxed this view a little. I’m instead going to take the view that it means ‘different devices’. This is generally more intuitive to understand.
What do I currently do then?
Well I have:
3 copies of my data:
One on my computer
One in the cloud
One on an external hard drive
2 Different storage types (different devices, I actually have 3):
Computer
Cloud
External drive
1 Different Geographical Location (I actually have 2!)
My house (the computer)
Cloud (wherever the servers are located for my cloud sevice)
A family members house (external drive)
It’s a bit of a pain because every so often I have to update the external drive manually. And between updates technically I don’t have everything backed up there. For now though it will get the job done. It’s better to have something, anything done now and then improve upon it later instead of waiting.
Did you know that you can actually set up your own personal and private cloud? This is what’s commonly referred to as a ‘NAS’ or ‘Network Attached Storage’ device. This will be my next improvement. And when setup correctly will negate the need for me to manually update the backup hard drive. There are plenty of prebuilt options available with a quick search online if you’re interested. This might end up being a future post now that I think about it.
Final thoughts
Please don’t wait for a flood. Don’t gamble with technology that fails, passwords that get forgotten, or accounts that lock you out. Your photos are more than files. They are memory’s , identity, proof of where you’ve been and what you’ve lived through. Back them up before it’s too late.