In the era of digital photography, we can't overlook the idea of data backup. I am working as an IT professional for over 12 years now and I couldn't emphasize more on the importance of data backup. In my professional career, I implement multiple layers of backups and disaster recovery systems to protect the company data. The data we work with and the storing methods for those data have changed a lot over the years. We used to deal with Megabytes and Gigabytes of data, which have now changed to Terabytes and Petabytes. High resolution images, 4K and Ultra 4K HD videos are becoming normal with the increasing popularity of smartphones and advanced cameras. These high quality files are helping us to be more creative but managing them is becoming a problem.

Back in the days of film photography, we could only take a certain number of pictures per roll. Also, we would have to keep the negative as a backup for the future production. But digital photography has changed the way we take pictures and the way we store them. We can now take unlimited number of pictures without ever getting worried about the space on the camera memory. Even if the memory is full, we can download them on a computer within a few minutes and make it available for the shooting immediately. Given the number of files we capture during one shooting, I think its time to think about the proper backup solution so that we don’t lose the pictures because of the memory crash or the computer hard-disk failure. If you are working on time sensitive projects, the worst thing that can happen is lose all of the photographs that you have taken for the clients because of the electronics malfunction. Now, you may argue that even our backup device or the service may fail and we may lose the data. In short, yes it can happen, but, having a multiple backups is obviously a better idea than storing your pictures on a single memory card or rely on your computer hard-disk only. The chances of failing multiple devices at the same time are very very low, and also, there are few strategies you can implement to decrease that chance to virtually zero.