I’ve met photographers who lost years of work to hard drive failures. Wedding photographers who’ve had to tell clients their photos are gone. Travelers who returned from once-in-a-lifetime trips with corrupted memory cards.

Every time, the cause was the same: inadequate backup strategy. Here’s how to protect your photos without overcomplicating things or spending a fortune.

Memory Cards: Your First Line of Defense

Memory cards fail less often than hard drives, but when they do, the data is usually unrecoverable. The key is buying reliable cards and handling them properly.

Stick to major brands: SanDisk, Lexar, Samsung, Sony. Cheap off-brand cards from Amazon save you maybe $20 and increase your risk of failure dramatically. False economy.

For capacity, multiple smaller cards are safer than one huge card. I’d rather have four 64GB cards than one 256GB card. If one fails, you lose a quarter of a shoot, not all of it.

SD cards come in different speed classes. For photography, you need UHS-I (U3 or V30) minimum. This ensures the card can keep up with your camera’s burst shooting and video recording. For 4K video or high-megapixel cameras, consider UHS-II (V60 or V90).

CFexpress cards are becoming standard in high-end cameras. They’re fast and reliable but expensive. Again, stick to known brands.

Don’t fill memory cards completely. Leave 10-15% free space. Full cards are more prone to corruption and errors.

Card Handling Best Practices

Format cards in the camera, not on the computer. The camera’s formatting is optimized for how it writes data.

Don’t delete individual images on the card. Shoot, download everything, then format. Deleting creates fragmentation that can lead to errors.

Turn off your camera before removing the card. Yanking a card while the camera is writing can corrupt files.

Keep cards in cases, not loose in bags where they collect dust and get damaged.

Have backup cards. If you’re going on a big trip or shooting something important, bring at least 50% more card capacity than you think you’ll need. Cards are cheap compared to missing once-in-a-lifetime shots.

Downloading and Initial Storage

Download photos as soon as practical. Don’t leave photos on cards for weeks. The longer they sit, the more chance of card failure.

When downloading, verify the transfer completed successfully before formatting the card. Most photo management software shows you when the import finished. Don’t rush it.

I follow a “3-2-1 backup rule” that’s standard in professional circles:

3 copies of your data. 2 different media types. 1 copy off-site.

This sounds complicated, but in practice, it’s straightforward.

Local Storage: Hard Drives

Your computer’s internal drive is your working copy. This is where your Lightroom catalog lives and where you actively edit.

But internal drives fail. Laptops get dropped, stolen, or die. Don’t rely on this as your only copy.

External hard drives are cheap storage for your backup copies. Get a decent external HDD (traditional spinning drive) with at least 2TB capacity. These cost around $80-100 and are perfect for backups.

For faster performance, SSDs (solid-state drives) are great but more expensive per gigabyte. I use an SSD for active projects I’m working on and HDDs for long-term backup.

Get two external drives. One stays connected to your computer and backs up automatically. The other goes to a different physical location (a friend’s house, your office, a safe deposit box).

Rotate them periodically. Once a month, swap the locations and update the off-site backup. This ensures your off-site copy is reasonably current.

Cloud Backup: The Essential Safety Net

Cloud storage has become affordable and essential. Even if your house burns down with all your local drives, your photos survive.

Options include:

Backblaze: $7/month for unlimited backup. It runs in the background, continuously backing up your entire computer including external drives. This is what I use and recommend for most photographers.

Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive: Good for storing specific folders, not great for backing up your entire photo library (too expensive at scale).

Specialized photo services like Smugmug or Zenfolio: These are more for sharing and portfolio hosting than backup, but they can serve as an additional copy.

Amazon Photos: Unlimited full-resolution photo storage included with Amazon Prime. This is excellent value if you’re already a Prime member.

The important thing about cloud backup: set it up once and let it run automatically. If you have to remember to back up manually, you’ll eventually forget.

Workflow Example

Here’s my actual workflow from shoot to secure storage:

Shoot on multiple memory cards, swapping them as needed.

At the end of the day (or when I get home), download all cards to my laptop’s internal drive using Lightroom. This creates copy #1.

Lightroom is set to import to a folder that’s continuously backed up to Backblaze (cloud). This creates copy #2.

Once per week, I run a manual backup to an external HDD that stays connected to my desk. This creates copy #3 on different media.

Once per month, I update my off-site external HDD that lives at my brother’s house. This ensures copy #3 has an off-site version.

Only after I’ve confirmed the photos are on at least two locations do I format the memory cards for reuse.

For Professional Work

If you’re shooting weddings, events, or anything where you can’t recapture the moment, increase your redundancy:

Use cameras with dual card slots. Shoot to both cards simultaneously. If one card fails during the shoot, you have the other.

Back up immediately after the shoot, before you go to bed. Don’t wait.

Keep backups until after final delivery and client confirmation. Only then can you consider deleting files to reclaim space.

Some wedding photographers keep client galleries online for years as an additional backup layer.

How Much Storage Do You Need?

This varies wildly based on how much you shoot and whether you shoot RAW or JPEG.

A 24-megapixel camera shooting RAW produces files around 25-30MB each. Shoot 1000 photos, that’s 25-30GB.

If you shoot casually (a few hundred photos per month), 1-2TB of backup storage lasts years.

If you shoot professionally (thousands of images per month), you’ll need multiple multi-terabyte drives and should budget for expanding storage annually.

Storage is cheaper than losing work. Don’t skimp here.

RAID: Is It Necessary?

RAID systems mirror your data across multiple drives, so if one drive fails, you don’t lose data.

For most photographers, RAID is overkill. The cost and complexity aren’t justified when you can achieve similar protection with simpler backup strategies.

RAID is not a backup. If you accidentally delete files or your computer gets ransomware, RAID mirrors the deletion or encryption across all drives. You still need separate backups.

Professional studios with massive storage needs might use RAID, but for individuals, external drives plus cloud backup is simpler and more practical.

Testing Your Backups

Backups are worthless if they don’t work. Periodically verify you can actually restore files from your backups.

Try restoring a random photo from your external drive. Try downloading a file from your cloud backup. Make sure the process works before you need it in an emergency.

I know this sounds paranoid, but there’s nothing worse than discovering your backup system didn’t work when you need it.

The Cost of Protection

Let’s add up a reasonable backup system:

Good quality memory cards: $50-100 Two external 2TB HDDs: $80-100 each = $160-200 Cloud backup subscription: $7/month = $84/year

Total initial cost: $300-400, then $84 annually for cloud.

This protects potentially thousands of dollars worth of equipment and irreplaceable memories. It’s the best money you’ll spend as a photographer.

Don’t Gamble with Your Work

I’ve seen too many photographers lose everything because they were complacent about backup. “I’ll set up cloud backup next month.” “My external drive is probably fine, it’s only a few years old.” “I’ll get around to organizing my storage system soon.”

Then disaster strikes. And there’s no recovery.

Set up a proper backup system now. Today. Before you take another photo. Your future self will thank you.