Whoa, Back Up. Back UP!

Are you backing up your images? If you are in business, then I am guessing yes. If you are not a wedding photographer though, you may not have been concentrating on backing up as much as you should be. Child photographers can reshoot, but there are moments just like in weddings that you can’t get back – and your clients will be heartbroken if you lose those files.

For me personally, I back up with Time Machine on my Mac, I backup all client files on another external hard drive, and I also use a company called Backblaze to store my images off-site. You back up online, just by installing the software. It does it all for you, for unlimited files.

I just recently needed to use Backblaze to get a handful of files, and it was very easy. Just login, find your files, and they will send you an emails when the files are all zipped up and ready to download. The whole process took about 10 minutes.
Backblaze has a couple of minor downsides – you can only view file names, so if you are looking to see thumbnails of images, you will be out of luck. Also, the download takes awhile – it took me about 2 hours to download 8GB. They don’t recommend even trying to download anything larger than 20GB at a time, so it could be time consuming to recover a lot of large files. You can also get them to send you a DVD or USB of your data – but it costs more. Although $189 for every 400GB would be a very small price to pay to get back ALL of your info and not have to pay a specialist to recover it for you. Also, don’t freak out if it takes weeks or even months to intially backup all your info. It WILL happen eventually, and then it will be very quick after that. I never noticed any type of slowdown on my internet while backing up which is great.

It costs $5 a month per computer, or if you purchase a whole year they knock it down to $50. That’s extremely reasonable for this type of service and it’s so easy to give yourself the extra peace of mind.

Backblaze has given Two Photogs readers a 10% discount for the month of February – just use code FebTwoPhotogs at purchase. Happy backing up!