How To Prevent Disastrous, yet Common Data Problems

As a creative professional, doing everything in your power to avoid data loss and corruption is part of the job. Whilst most are more than happy to invest in the latest and greatest camera gear, investing in a quality backup solution is often overlooked. We dive into workflow tips that can help you and your clients avoid data catastrophes.

Drives fail for all kinds of reasons, whether that be overheating, water damage, power issues or end of life. This is why we back up data.
 
Chances areyou’ve heard horror stories of professional photographers and videographers that have lost shots not yet delivered to the client, or even worse, their entire portfolio.
 
It’s devastating to lose your own personal memories, but imagine losing images belonging to a paying client, documenting their most important life events. I think we can all agree that having to navigate a situation like this would be downright terrifying!
 
Many of us are guilty of thinking “this won’t happen to me,” until disaster strikes and you are forced to put a solid backup workflow in place. We provide some simple storage tips to help avoid common data mishaps.

WRITE TO TWO MEMORY CARDS

One problem that you may have encountered yourself is a corrupted memory card. There are many reasons why a memory card may fail, from physical damage and improper removal, to a malware attack or file system corruption.
 
For this reason if you have a camera with dual card slots, it’s recommended to write to your cards in backup mode as opposed to overflow mode, which means any shots captured will be written to both memory cards.
 
In the unfortunate case of a failed card, you should be covered with all your files safely stored on the second card.
 
Another precaution to safekeeping your memory cards is to invest in a quality card reader to prevent corruption –you may be surprised how many times the card reader can be the problem The SanDisk Professional PRO-READERS provide an extra layer of protection, with an integrated write-protect lock switch to prevent you from accidentally overwriting any existing data
prevent disastrous, yet common data problems_1

IMMEDIATE BACKUP ON LOCATION

Whilst writing to two memory cards is a worthwhile first step to preventing data loss, it is just as necessary to suck the data off those cards and onto an external solution.

Immediate backup is even more important when working on location, which is often part of the course for many photographers and filmmakers.

Over the course of your shoot or travels, the portable drive will come to hold all of the images you’ve shot, so regardless of what happens to your memory cards, and how many times you need to reformat them, you will arrive back to the studio with at least one copy.

Many creative professionals even back up to a second external hard drive, kept in two separate locations, whether that’s one in their camera bag and another in their suitcase or hotel safe for extra peace of mind.

Many creative professionals even back up to a second external hard drive, kept in two separate locations, whether that’s one in their camera bag and another in their suitcase or hotel safe for extra peace of mind.

prevent disastrous, yet common data problems_2

NEVER WORK OFF CLIENT HARD DRIVES

Now, let’s say you’re commissioned for an edit job on third party photos provided by a client. One of the worst things you can do is work off the drive or USB they provide.

More often than not, a client will not be well versed in fool-proof backup processes and may be handing over the only copy they have.

If the drive is somehow corrupted, it’s impossible for you to know whether the original photographer has kept a back up and the data may very well be lost for good.

Losing any images, particularly irreplaceable events such as wedding or newborn photographs, will be understandably devastating for the client.

As soon as you receive the drive, it’s best to automatically make a copy and return the drive to the client to ease their mind too!

IMPLEMENT A RAID SYSTEM

Once you’ve arrived back home or to the studio after a job, one of the most reliable ways to back up your portable drives is to a RAID system.
 
For extra important images and footage, implementing RAID 1 can provide ultimate redundancy. This simply means the data is directly mirrored or copied to another drive.
 
If one drive within the system is to fail, you will have another identical drive up and running where you should be able to access your data.
 
Naturally, with RAID 1 “mirrored” drives will be invisible to you, so you may need to up your overall capacity if you’re working with big files.
prevent disastrous, yet common data problems_3

STORE DATA IN TWO LOCATIONS

No matter how secure your storage solutions are, life is unpredictable and events completely out of your control do occur -whether that’s a fire, flood, or theft.

You may have heard the catastrophic story of a wedding photographer who had their entire apartment (and life’s work with it!) destroyed in a house fire. 

With this came a multitude of problems in customer refunds who had their wedding shots lost, and the wasted efforts spent in hours of editing, shooting on the day and travel time.

For this reason, it’s a good idea to have another copy of your most important images at a second off-site location, whether that be at your office, studio, or a relative’s home.

Establish a regular backup routine in this second location. Depending on how often you shoot this may be a weekly, monthly or quarterly regime to keep the data up to date.

© 2022 Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates. All rights reserved. SanDisk Professional, G-Technology and G-RAID are registered trademarks or trademarks of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.

1 As used for storage capacity, one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment and RAID/JBOD configuration.

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