Backup Tips for Wedding Digital Photos

This is a wedding photography lesson that I learned the hard way: backing up your priceless digital photos should be part of your weekly, or even your daily routine.

I remember this one time when I had to give a newlywed couple a partial refund because almost half of the set of wedding photos that I took on their big day got lost because my hard drive crashed.

It turned out that recovering data is a pretty expensive – not to mention challenging – feat for a hard drive recovery expert. So I thought that it was more practical to just return part of the couple's deposit rather than paying an arm and a leg for the photos to be recovered.

It’s a good thing that I had a second amateur photographer with me who still had copies of the same shots that I lost so we were able to put together a decent wedding album for the couple.

So what's the best way for a wedding photographer to back up digital photos? There are actually a lot of options that you can try. Here's what I do. After every wedding, I download all of the unedited photos onto my computer's hard drive. Then, I copy the files on my external hard drive and finally, I a bunch of CD or DVD copies of the pictures to give to the bride and groom, some of their family members, and a couple of the disks will go onto my archived file.

If you want, you can even try backing up your files on a reliable online photo sharing sites like Picasa Web Albums, Photoshop Express, Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly.com. Just make sure that these sites will not resize the photos that you uploaded.

Remember that you can never have too many backups, so make it a habit to create copies of all your digital media, especially after covering a wedding. These precious photos are not just a great addition to your portfolio as a wedding photographer, but they are also priceless for the newlywed couple who shared such a special day for you to witness and capture on film.