Today I’m getting real with you. This post is long, but if you are a photographer it’ll be worth it.
Not that I’m not always real…but today it’s serious.
There are things as a Professional Photographer that are a MUST
These things are NOT:
-The top of the line equipment.
I’ve seen some of the most incredibly beautiful photographs executed on a consumer camera/lens set up. If you are good at your craft, you can create something beautiful with less than ideal equipment…although in the long term the good stuff doesn’t hurt that’s for dang sure!
-A professionally created website.
While I would love to say I had the incredibly talented Jen Olmstead create my setup…I am not at the point where I can drop that kinda change. I’ll get there, one day I aspire to have Jen create magic on my little piece of the www. But my little template that I personally spent hours customizing to me, works beautifully for now!
-A verified Insta/Twitter, with hundreds of thousands of followers.
While I would LOVE for this to happen one day, it’s not my ultimate goal.
My ultimate goal is two fold:
Create a customized experience that my clients will talk about for years to come.
To build a business that allows me to put my family first.
But what is a MUST?
BACKUP SYSTEMS!
This is where it gets real. If you are a professional photographer and you do not have multiple…let me reiterate this…MULTIPLE back up systems, your business is a ticking time bomb!
Last week, I sat down at my computer to get a bit of work done and all of the sudden I realized my computer wasn’t recognizing my big momma external hard drive where I keep everything.
I unplugged it, reset it, and then proceeded to restart my computer too. I thought it was just being a little screwy, no biggie. I plugged it back up, and waited…and waited…and NOTHING. I unplugged it and plugged it into my laptop, thinking maybe something was wrong with my iMac. NOTHING.
I start frantically googling my exact external drive and what was happening. It looked grim.
Now this is where I will stop and also say that I am notorious for NOT reading reviews…it’s a fault of mine I know. I should’ve asked Chris to look at reviews and tell me which big momma to buy…but I didn’t. It seems this specific type of drive has this issue on a semi regular basis… not something you want to read when your system is failing. And the worst part, I read that once it doesn’t show that’s curtains. Lights out. Finished.
WHAT?! Surely this is a mistake?! Surely it couldn’t just be wiped clean??
I also have a data recovery program, because I have had corrupted cards in the past (out of the 10+ years I’ve been shooting personally/professionally, this has only happened maybe twice…but it’s terrible when it does).
I ran diagnostics on my computer first, then on the recovery program. NOTHING. It was WIPED CLEAN! Not a bit of data was being recognized on it.
Insert UGLY CRYING, and PANIC mode! Chris didn’t know how to handle me lol!
It took a moment to sink in.
Then the light went off. HELLO! Rachel you have multiple backups for THIS VERY REASON!
What are my backups you ask? I thought you’d never ask…
When I arrive home from a session, I immediately download the RAW files onto my external hard drive. Then I set those memory cards aside. ESPECIALLY for weddings. Cards that have images not delivered are not used until the gallery has been safely delivered. At that point if I have a system malfunction at least I know my client has the gallery.
Then the biggest and safest backup system I have…CrashPlan42.
This is an online backup system that runs in the background on my iMac and MacBook. I have it set to save everything off of all my external drives as well as my desktops.
THIS was my saving grace! I was able to recover everything I needed, without much effort at all!
I cannot express enough how that little $21/mo bill I have is worth paying! It saved me THOUSANDS of dollars! Which if you have ever looked into extensive data recovery (that’s not always a guarantee), it’s in the thousands…
If you run a professional photography business and you don’t have multiple backups, you need to RUN not walk (metaphorically speaking that is), to make this happen!
Do you use another online backup program? I would love for you to comment with what you use so others can see options!
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