File Robots are the Future!
This was originally published in my Prime Lenses Newsletter. You can sign-up for a weekly update to your inbox here.
Where do your photos go once you’ve captured them? When you’re asked that, chances are you think of social media platforms like Threads, Instagram and Bluesky, all of which I’m on BTW. We should follow each other.
My images quite often wind up on an Instagram story for a few hours before they evaporate. I have to remember to post things to my feed or journal app for them to have any meaningful permanence online.
Aside from that though, I have a whole process that I go through to make sure I don’t lose any images. Kaj O’Connell was posting about it recently, and then Dave Herring also posted some extensive Stories covering the extent of his backup approach so I decided that as something is clearly in the air I could talk about my approach and what I’ve changed of late.
So here’s my setup.
Remember, I’m a tourist, so this isn’t going to be the setup you’d use if you were a pro and I’m not pretending for a moment here that I’m inventing something. It’s just the end of the year and I’m reflecting on what I do.
Firstly, there’s technically a backup made at the point of capture. The M11 has 64GB of internal storage and I match that with a 64GB SD card with images saved to both. All cameras should have some internal storage. It' has saved me multiple times when I’ve left my card plugged into a computer at home.
After capture, comes processing. Light Room Classic as my preferred photo editor and while subscribing to an image editor is annoying it includes 20GB of cloud storage I can use to sync between devices which is a backup adjacent feature, you’ll fill it up fast if you shoot modern RAW and it can be slow but it’s better than nothing.
Once I’ve processed and tagged my photos I have 2 Publish locations set up to export the images to.
Like a monster, I discard my RAW files after I’ve edited. Again, I can do this, because I’m a tourist and how often do you go back and re-edit your photos anyway? Appreciating great photography doesn’t mean you have to turn it into a job and make your workflow the same as someone photographing a news event for Reuters!
Publishing services in Lightroom are a great feature as they let you consistently send your images to a server with all the metadata included and to a specified quality, all with a single click. I have one set up to go to the NAS and one to go to Flickr which forms my offsite component.
And now for the bit I just added. The NAS is a 2 bay model set up RAID1 so that the drives are a mirror of each other but that in of itself isn’t a guarantee of data integrity. Technically because both copies are made at the same time, corrupt data could just be written to both locations at the same time. So I need a third place, and in this case a third place is a 1TB USB drive that I had in a drawer. I’ve had this plugged in for a while but hadn’t worked out what to do with it until I found Hyper Backup which is included with the NAS. It’s super easy to set up and means that my little file robot will back up everything from the photos folder to the external drive each night at 3am. It is just a copy, not an incremental backup but it even allows me to set it to not delete files if they’re removed from the source folder. A little extra protection from accidental deletion which is neat.
This workflow is largely the same if I scan instant photos too. I scan them, bring them into Light Room, use Lens Tagger to add metadata about the camera and paper used and then export in the same way.
I’m interested to hear what you do with your images? What’s your canonical backup location? Which then prompts a deeper more complex question. How do we train our families to be able to find all of this stuff?!! One for a future newsletter.