You’ve heard it from someone you know personally I’m sure. In my case, I’ve heard it from four close friends and I’ve had about six phone calls from others photographer’s couples who want me to photograph bridal portraits again so they can have something at all from their wedding day.

Their Photographer lost their images! *What?!*

Maybe to some of you this sounds foreign. I’ve heard it way too often unfortunately. We’ve even booked two weddings last minute because the couples never heard from their photographer and were afraid they’d never show up. Sure enough they didn’t (or there would’ve been two of us there).

So what’s the biggest mistake photographers are making?

NOT BACKING UP THEIR FILES!

Friends, thankfully in my early days I only lost two portrait sessions due to corruption of cards, but this was something I could make up after many apologies. But what about a WEDDING? A funeral? A birth story? (Luckily round two for me went  better at these makeup sessions I felt. (I like to consider that a blessing in disguise I guess? But still no feeling or experience I’d wish on a photographer or client ever).

Now that I’ve learned myself and also learned from the heart ache of some of my closest friends who will never have a single image from their wedding day due to “lost images, malfunctioned cards,” or even worse, just never hearing from their hired photographer again…

I’ve created a system that is bullet proof.

1. We purchased cameras that’s have dual card slots. I can set my camera settings to this: One card that captures all my RAW files, one card that captures .jpgs only or I can set both cards to capture both (ideal).
2. One of my cards in my camera is normally my assistants cards and one is normally mine. Same for their camera. One usually mine and one usually theirs. Then when they head home at the end of the night they take a copy and I take a copy just in case.
3. Immediately when I get home, I take my .jpg files and back them up to my online photo storage. (I now have copies of the images in 3 places).
4. While doing that I also backup the .RAW files to an external hard drive. Now the images are saved in FOUR places within minutes!

Boom.

I can rest assured.

Heaven forbid a fire happens at my house (which is why we need a backup elsewhere).

Heaven forbid a tornado happens and wipes out both my house and my assistants house (which is why we need a backup online).

Heaven forbid we have an internet outage across the universe (one: terrifying, two: which is why we need an external hard drive back up).

With this kind of system in place our clients can sleep at ease knowing their beautiful stories are backed up in four different places never to be lost again!

This is my tried and true bullet proof way to avoid the biggest mistake a photographer can make = losing precious moments you can never get back for someone.

Don’t be that photographer!

If you don’t have a dual slot camera, upgrade immediately. Taking chances with having only one card capturing the images is now terrifying to me.