BACKING-UP & FUTURE-PROOFING YOUR WEDDING IMAGES
Preserving your future memories
5 top tips for backing up and future proofing your wedding images.
1. Think of the future. Usb’s will not be around forever and newer computers will probably not even be able to read them. My advice is to use multiple forms of backup, relying on one copy or type of drive isn’t always the best plan if you hope to access the files in the future. File corruption can also happen for a number of different reasons but the best way to avoid having to deal with the hassle of it, is having multiple copies of the original files.
2. Multiple Locations. Storage is relatively cheap these days, it is a good idea to think of what can happen to your valuables should the worst happen, for example a house fire or flood damage or burglary. If you can, leave a copy on a drive or computer of someone close to you like immediate family. Think of it like insurance. You don’t need it until you do!
3. Cloud Storage. This is a great way of backing up any valuable files. Google drive offer some free storage that you can of course use for your wedding images and I think they even allow you to password protect the folders for your privacy. However, free may not always be the best. Although google is a major global company, if data is lost on a free account, google won’t be liable. You can get lots of reasonably priced cloud storage accounts that will have multiple backups of your files should anything go wrong on their side. You can make the most of these accounts by storing other precious or valuable documents in the cloud for when you might need them.
4. Print. One of the best way of preserving your memories are to have them printed. If it is just small prints or high quality printed albums, this is one of the best ways to ensure you don’t loose the moments you never want to forget. The one downside to digital photography is that in a lot of cases really good, meaningful images often get left in digital format and are rarely looked at just because with most people, life takes over and its one of those things that can and is put on the long finger.
5. Avoid social media albums. I have heard from couples in the past who have backed up their wedding images to the likes of facebook or instagram and put them into a private folder. It seems like a great idea, free storage and almost feels like you’re getting one up on old zuckerberg! Definitely not the best idea for wedding images. Mark and the social tycoons don’t like paying for your image backups and for this reason they have implemented clever software to resize your image resolution on upload. This basically strips your image of so much detail and it still looks like a reasonable image on a small phone screen but when you look to have an album printed from these files, the resolution simply won’t look good, it will make them look pixelated and really low quality.
To copy your images, open your usb which should contain three folders. 1. Original edit, 2. bw and 3. preview. Highlight the three folders and go to edit and copy. Go to the location of your intended backup folder and click edit and paste. This should only take a few minutes and once its copied you can eject your drives and repeat the process if you wish. One tip to make sure everything is copied over is to check the used capacity of the drive you copied your files to, it should show the same as your original usb drive.
Please remember: The investment you made to have professional photographs of your wedding day only holds value if you can see and relive the memories of your wedding day. Please strongly consider the advice and recommendations above as I do not guarantee I will have copies of your wedding images after the wedding is delivered.