One of the most common questions I get asked is: How do I back up my photos?

If you are like me, before I had a system, I would just copy important photos to an external hard drive or somewhere like Dropbox and put them in some random folder.

And then I would be nervous I would lose them or I would look for them and couldn’t find them due to my haphazard naming system so I would copy them somewhere else.

And then pretty soon I just had a mess and couldn’t find anything anywhere and I was still stressed about losing my photos. Plus I was paying more for cloud storage than I really needed to because I had duplicates EVERYWHERE!

Sound familiar?

If it does, what you need is a backup system.

What does that look like?

The standard recommended practice for any type of data (including photos) is that you have three copies on at least two types of storage and at least 1 offsite. The offsite backup is in case of natural disaster such as fire or flood. Multiple copies is for computer crashes, hard drive failures or for that moment when your toddler spills his drink on your laptop keyboard.

How do you do that?

Here are the Steps:

1. Gather your photos in one location. This can be your computer or an external hard drive. It really shouldn’t be the cloud at this point because it’s really important to have local control of your photos. This will be your working copy which will be on your external hard drive or computer.

2. In an ideal world, you would want to make sure that you have gotten rid of duplicates and sorted your photos into some sort of system before you go and back them up somewhere else like the cloud or another external hard drive.

If you use something like Adobe Lightroom this is pretty easy to do in a relatively short amount of time. You can also use other free software programs. But if you can’t do this in a timely manner it’s best to just backup what you have. You can clean it up later.

3. Choose a cloud backup and make a copy of your photos there. Unlike external hard drives, this is a bigger decision. There are several questions you need to consider when choosing a cloud backup. Some of these are: Are my photos private? Is the cloud service storing originals or compressing them to save space? How easy is it to get my photos back? Is my cloud service syncing only or backing up and syncing (hello iPhone users – this is a big one for you!) What happens if I forget to pay for one month?

4. Copy your entire collection to a second external hard drive. Ideally you would keep this offsite. This is your second backup.

5. Now that you have a working copy, a copy on the cloud and a copy on a backup external hard drive. 3 copies on two types of media and one is offsite. Well done!

6. Create a schedule. This is where a lot of backups fail. You get everything backed up but then you forget to do it on a regular basis or check to make sure it is working every month.

Backing up your photos is the single most important thing you can do to make sure your family’s history is protected. Don’t leave it to chance.

You can backup anytime but I highly recommend creating a Master Photo Collection first and then backing that up. That way you know you are protecting ALL your important memories instead of just guessing at what photos are where.

If you want some help, check out this short course on Creating a Fail-Safe Backup System.