Planning For Failure
As photographers, two challenging situations we could potentially be faced with, is either the loss of equipment or the loss of images. In terms of equipment loss, this may arise due to various reasons, such as theft, leaving something behind at a location, accidental damage or a general failure when something stops functioning.
From personal experience, I have been fortunate so far, not have been exposed to the trauma of having any of my equipment stolen, but I can confess to contending with the other afore-mentioned situations. Some notable occurrences include leaving behind a brand new monopod when I stopped to take in the surroundings at the Swedish Cottage in Central Park, New York, or the time I dropped a 10-stop filter on to stoney ground whilst photographing at Ullswater in the Lake District, smashing the filter to smithereens.
As for general failure, a common issue that many of us have experienced including myself, has been the failure of IT hardware or software resulting in the requirement to recover from this occurrence. On these instances this is where the exposure to the second situation, i.e. the loss of images could potentially arise. Unless contingencies are in place to recover from this failure, unlike cameras, lenses, filters etc which can be replaced in time, the loss of images is something that could have a significant and long lasting impact on our photography, regardless of whether you are a professional or non-professional.
I have been fortunate to have avoided the loss of my photography work as I learned a hard lesson many years ago, when a hard drive containing all my MP3 music collection was accidently damaged, and that lesson being, unless you have a back up (which I didn’t at that time), the process of a full recovery will be difficult at best or more likely to be impossible.
In relation to my photography, I adopt a ‘Planning for Failure’ approach which in essence, is being proactive in preparing for potential setbacks and have a contingency in place to aid any recovery. It is not about expecting failure, but it is being realistic that failure may occur, and should it arise, then the extent of the failure can be addressed accordingly.
The following is a summary of my recovery strategy and is based around my requirements at the time of writing this blog. I appreciate there are alternative approaches to what I have in place and everyone’s capabilities and needs will be different but hopefully the key principles will be similar in terms of the overall strategy.
When I am away from home, I take separate memory cards for every day I am away and at the end of each day, I will make a back-up of the card to an external solid-state drive (SSD) that I only use when away from home. If I am capturing images in the UK, this back-up tends to be via my MacBook and if I am abroad, this will be via my iPad and a USB-C hub. By using a different memory card for each day, this reduces the risk to losing all my images for the entire trip in the event of a corrupted card. The worst-case scenario would be the loss of what I captured on a particular day prior to the failure, safe in the knowledge that all the other days are on separate memory cards and are also backed up on the afore-mentioned SSD.
At home, my back-up strategy is based on the overarching principle of the 3-2-1 approach, namely……
3 copies of all data (the original files + 2 back-up copies)
2 different devices used for storing data at home
1 offsite copy of all data
I used to store all my images on the hard drive of my iMac, however over time, space on my hard drive became limited, therefore I was compelled to move my main image library to an external solid-state drive (different SSD to the one used whilst travelling). Taking this approach ensured that should I require it, I can increase my storage capacity more easily in the future and, should I decide to update my iMac to a newer model at some point, then I don’t have to worry about migrating my images from one computer to another.
In addition to using this drive for the storage of my images, I also store my Adobe Lightroom catalogue on this drive and, additionally, all the associated files that have contributed to the creation of my website. In essence, this one drive has everything stored on it related to my photography work and as such, I class this as my main working drive.
For my first back-up, I utilise another external drive to store an exact mirror copy of my main working drive. To create this copy, I use a programme called Carbon Copy Cloner which monitors my main working drive for any changes and then updates my back-up drive accordingly.
My second back-up involves creating a copy of my main working drive utilising cloud storage. Originally this was done via Microsoft One Drive, as I had 1TB of storage on the Microsoft cloud as an Office 365 user. However, similar to the same situation as my iMac, I eventually ran out of storage space on the One Drive cloud. Nowadays, my cloud storage solution is undertaken via Backblaze as there is no limit to the amount of data I can store on their cloud. (An alternative to cloud storage is to use another external hard drive to maintain a copy of your data, but with the proviso that is not stored in the home but in a location external to the home). Once I have the onsite and offsite back-ups completed, only then will I format my used memory cards for future use.
Recently, I updated my back-up strategy to also include aspects related to Adobe Photoshop. This was due to stability issues being encountered following a Photoshop software update which resulted in the decision to roll back to the previous stable version of Photoshop. Following the reversion, I discovered my photography workspace had reverted back to default settings and was not displaying the customised set up I had prior to the software update. Whilst this was not a major issue, as I hadn’t previously backed up any of the key presets and preference files, it did require me to reconfigure my workspace again. I have subsequently now identified all these files and have them now included in my back-up strategy which will speed up the recovery process should I encounter a similar issue in the future.
By having a back-up strategy, should a failure arise, then it is more likely to be an inconvenience as opposed to being a catastrophe. Hopefully the only loss will be your time as you put your recovery plan into action rather than lamenting the loss of your valuable work due to a lack of preparedness.