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Best Practices: Backing Up and Equipment

Let's, jump to let's stop talking about shooting for a second and let's jump to backup procedures. Nothing overly complicated here. It's actually pretty simple and streamlined. I don't like some of the offline options, right? So there's companies out there, we can back up into the cloud. I'm here to tell you they're just not there yet. In a year or two, we might be having a different conversation, but cloud storage is so fricking slow it would take me. I look it like three months remaining, right? Because the amount of shooting we do to get all those images up into the cloud, you might have unlimited storage, but I don't know if he realizes they're throttling your internet speed your internet connection, right? So if I'm tryingto from trying to upload all these images and I'm getting upload speeds of like thirty nine kilobytes per second that's worse than dial up that is going to take forever for all my images get uploaded, so the cloud storage is just not there yet. Now, you know, if ...

you know if you don't care and you want to take six months to back up your hard drive, that sounds great. What happens if one of your drives fails in the six month window? You're screwed, so this is the way we do it. Download to a hard drive that night so as soon as I get home I take all those memory cards and I immediately start downloading them to ah hard drive ok ah production drive we then back up to a secondary hard drive that night and I use labeling so if you want a mac right you can label each folder of color so if if it hasn't been backed up it's not green once it's been backed up I turned the folder green that's how I know and I don't make any mistakes I don't lose track of where I'm at that's how I know everything's been backed up it's one of those simple little things that'll save your ass one day we then archive those drives so once those secondary hard once those backup drives are completely full we take that put it in your basement put it in a ziploc bag put in your basement put in another part of the house put it in a safety deposit box right so if you're in like tornado alley putting it in another room doesn't do you any good you wouldn't want any kind of natural disaster right to screw your business up you couldn't have that happy um and then we catalogued the drives and the reason we catalog to drive is because you need to take your drives off line this is how drives fat fail there spinning right so it's hard drives are spinning that's what? They're mechanical in nature right there not those ssd drive their mechanical in nature and once they if they keep spinning eventually, over time they will fail. One thing is guaranteed your hard drive at some point will fail don't think that it won't fail. They will eventually fail their mechanical in nature that being the case, unplug them and archive them somewhere. But what do you do when you're like men? A client? Contact tax you three years later where's that image johnson one, two, four okay, they want it now. Get it in their album or something like that. We're going to start going in and plugging in all these drives looking for it. We use a program called cd finder cd finder I think is about fifty dollars or less. And what this allows you to do is archive all your drives. So you just run the programme you say archive this drive any catalogues? I'm sorry, I'm seeing archive emi catalog. It will catalogue everything on the drive. Now when you take a drive off line, the catalogue is still available and it will even show you thumbnails off the images so you can now search and say, where's the jones image and it'll pull up and say it'll say jones wedding is on dr number five and now you can go get dr number five plug it in and you save so much time doing that s o again it's all about time and efficiency when we talk about how we get the images ok, I use this delicate card reader they don't make it any more but it's a four card reader my biggest pet peeves is when I would come home from a wedding and I have to sit there one card at a time to download images and now I've got eight cards that I'm downloading and I'm just sitting there wasting all this time these things can actually be daisy changed you can now plug them together and you could download eight cards at one time to your hard drive yeah it's gonna take longer than mohr cards you add of course it's reading them on it can only write so fast but the good news is I can do this and go to bed and know that there are all downloading by morning and so this is something I would be looking into for your you know, for your business to make that investment I am going to take some questions we can go to break his next up we're gonna do we're gonna talk best practices around sales and taylor's going to be part of that discussions but questions about my backup procedures, weddings I can't believe there's no questions on weddings or engagements hit me now so uh photography asking great questions today uh sal must work on multiple computers to edit how does he deal with light room catalogs and transferring them between computers? That is actually that would be a false assumption. So when we're editing, I have one machine that's dedicated to light room and then I have one machine that's dedicated to video, so I do use multiple machines, but I've got one machine dedicated to video I'm one machine dedicated to light room and photoshopped postproduction, but here's what I do there over the years there's been all sorts of various best practices where you would create a light room catalog for each client that is a nightmare we don't do that. Instead I create a lightning catalog, my room four and now lightning five the performance is much better than older versions. I create one catalog per season, so for example, if I'm sitting there and it's twenty thirteen, I've got one catalog for all of twenty thirteen and all my works in there so that if I start exporting a wedding, I still can work in light room and start working on a high school senior job like that, so I'm not out of business one time once I start exporting a job, so hopefully that makes sense absolutely and I'm not sure if we've talked about cards before, uh but kristina would like to know as faras weddings or engagements if he used, do you do use different sized cards depending? Would you use a larger card for a wedding to make sure that you don't lose anything? Are you really careful about that way? Are so we use for video? We use thirty two gig cards, so if you're using a any of the five d's or any of the video cameras, the lars, we're using thirty two good cards there. We're using kingston thirty two good cards you want to use two, three thirty three or faster for that on foot. On the photography side, we're also using a combination of lexar and kingston, right? Just depends on what I can get my hands on and the price point, but those are the two manufacturers I like using anything else I've had trouble with that the cards will fail, so if you're looking at other companies, man, they might be you might be saving ten or fifteen bucks on a card, but those cards seem to fail more than they should. Where's, kingston and lex are I've really never had trouble with those cards. I've been very happy with them for a wedding, I'm typically using a sixteen gig card and that's going to give me, depending on the camera, from using the one, the axe or or you know one d mark three those air going allow me to get more or less images but anywhere from three hundred six hundred images on one of those sixteen gig card so that's typically when I'm using uh let's go ahead and look at oh I just lost the question and you go good natalie severson would like to know as far as backing up your backing up just one backup one image you don't have it doubled up you don't have it tripled up anywhere well I do have a doubled up because I have a production driver I'm sending it to and then have a separate backup drive so it's always in two spots no no that's okay yeah we definitely like to keep him in two spots for that very reason and also keep in mind I didn't really touch on this I've never deleted a single image in my entire career so that's how we were able to go back to the archives two thousand seven and find some of these uh these images there we go okay, I found the question finally kiki baby says engagement and family shoots what if it rains later heavy and they're expecting location do you have those sort of contingency plans built in your contract? Yes that is a great question so and taylor handles it sits in our client communications package in our client communication to them we let them know that if there's greater than a fifty percent chance of rain in the forecast and I'm not talking about seventy two hours in advance, I'm talking about twenty four hours in advance. If we're looking at the schedule and it's greater than a fifty percent chance of rain or the temperature will be higher than is at ninety five degrees and the temperature's higher than ninety five degrees, your your session will more than likely be rescheduled, so I'm not going to try and force a session and when it's gonna be one hundred degrees outside, I'm also not going to try and force it in if it's if there's a really good chance of rain and the truth is we've done that where in the midwest is brutal because it could say seventy percent chance of rain, you cancel all your sessions and then the sun is out and it's his beautiful, gorgeous day but that's the nature of the beast how do you handle the objection we happen to us recently? And the client was not very happy that we had to do that, which course was great. It was supposed to rain, it actually did look like rain and it was an hour before the shooting were like we have to reschedule there's no way we're going out in this wooded area it's gonna be money it's going to suck and then the sun came out it was absolutely gorgeous that's that's happens happens but are you being preemptive with it? Meaning are you putting it in the communication to them up front that's in all our initial conversation upfront? So if you're not all of a sudden you seem to be like oh she's just lazy she's a lazy however she doesn't want to work today is a beautiful day or whatever the case may be so instead we're outlining clearly in that initial email here's what to expect on you can expect that if it's this then it's this is what's gonna happen and the good news is is we're all looking at the same weather channel, right? So we're looking at whether dot com on we can say to them here it is here's what the weather showing here's the radar so we don't have to really arguing with them because ultimately in that same email it's saying something to the effect of the goal of the shoot is to get you the best possible images that's how we you know, kind of avert disaster when the sun does come out and the clients like well it turned out to be a great day we totally understand, but you were about to go get your hair and makeup done and rather than putting you in the chair and get your hair and makeup done, you know we want to make sure that we save that time for another day so we want the best pictures now in your case you're an hour before the shoot you should have played it by ear he's been like we're gonna have to play this by ear as long as you guys are okay? This is how I would work as long as you guys are okay. Pointed by year were ok, but we may get out there and we may have to reschedule this thing and that's what? You know, sometimes you got to dio in seattle. Yeah, changes within a half an hour, even on wedding days in the summer. I have a backup plan because, well, the wedding days, of course we have a backup plan, right? Got bank? I mean, engagement sessions, as you know it can change on you just gotta be ready. Go umbrellas, right. So umbrellas need to be part of your stylized shoot on. I would imagine if you're getting engaged in seattle, you that's probably part of the charm of it all. I say a couple more questions. All right, we do have a lot of like, backup questions. Um stephanie d asked if you keep if you just keep the raw images or if you keep all of the edited images well backed up are saved and then choke cherry also would like to know if you save your mistakes or your test shots as well or if you're going through and deleting those good question so when it comes to backup even on camera I'm not sitting there chipping the camera and just deleting to leading the leading why do I need to delete my mistakes, their mistakes I made them I'm okay with them I'm not hiding them from anybody so I save everything I do not call any of those images out and delete them I leave them all their hard drive space is so inexpensive I mean you can go to best buy right now and get a three terror by dry for probably about a hundred bucks why are you deleting anything? Just make the investment in your business and hang on to all this stuff so we don't delete anything what was the second part to that question though the second part was if you know if we stored and uh if we store just the raw files if you start your edited files as well yes so when we get there right we're creating the initial downloads so that's in one place then we're archiving to a backup that's in another place so what's there are two copies of all the raw files but now what'll happen is within the next two weeks we're going to get all the edited pictures okay, because of course, we're back. We're archiving the light room catalogue. So even if we were to lose one of the drives that had the edits on it, we now have the lightning catalog, which has all the ex mp data meta data. We can apply those that it's just right over again. But then what we'll do is, once they're edited, we render everything out to j peg. Well, what happens is, once those get rented out to j peg, because we've gotta be able to show the clients their images order their images that those j pegs are actually stored on yet another drive. So there at one point time they will be across three different drives. And so knock on wood. We've never had a problem where we've lost all our clients images and been able to recover them in some form or fashion. You gotta protect yourself in your businessman, use your digital images that could be disastrous to your business.