Don't Lose Your Photos! My Travel Backup & Workflow

[@darrenmctee2255]

Excellent as always! Keep them coming. I love the LR Library course and keep going back to it to refresh my knowledge. I used this backup technique from your course for a 12 day trip to Katmai just this month. It was SO nice to cull photos daily instead of having to wade through thousands of photos upon returning home. Such peace of mind to know there are backups on multiple SSD’s too. It’s literally a game changer for photo road trips! Thanks so much!

[@SloggerVlogger]

Thank you Steve. I always got myself in a muddle when traveling. Never thought of actually putting the catalogue on the travel hard drive. That will make it a lot easier.

[@brucegraner5901]

You're an excellent resource for just about all my photographic questions. I hope you have a great 2022. Thanks for all your hard work.

[@greggorter]

As an IT specialist myself, this is always fantastic advice for all photographers no matter what experience, great info Steve 😎👏

[@imagesbyrina]

Nice video! I do nearly the same for trips. But if you are making a copy *of the copy* you may be copying corrupt data (if for some reason it didn’t copy over properly). I make each backup from the memory card directly. Also backing up while importing is great thing many people may not be aware of! I’m even more insane and if there is an internet connection, my laptop will upload everything to Backblaze for an additional, off-site backup! 🙌🏻😆

[@jameswhitehead6758]

@6:13 : The only problem I have with moving folders full of images between SSDs is if you get a random copy error on one drive, it's replicated across all of your drives. I prefer to copy the empty folders to all of my drives and then copy-paste from the memory card to each drive individually. That way if one drive gets a random copy error, the other two drives are unaffected.

[@caloldblue]

Bingo! That very thing happened to me, and worse, if you don't open it up in Lightroom (instead of File Manager or the Apple equivalent) to check sometimes the thumbnail looks fine while the raw portion is corrupt. I will now only copy from the original source to both destinations (assuming not into LR). I also won't erase a card (if I can) until I have validated in LR.

[@antonoat]

Very interesting to see your workflow in detail Steve, thanks for sharing this. PS good to see you looking well, you can't keep a good man down! (thankfully).

[@marcusslade9804]

Fantastic, and such a good technique. I’ve commented to others in the BCG Forum and will do so here too that the module in your “Lightroom Library Video Tutorial” that covers this in even more detail is simply brilliant. Thanks as always, Steve.

[@eanderson1956]

Thank you sooo much. In one short video, you've made the process of backing up travel photos very clear.

[@meganpetermanmihelcic]

This was the exact solution I was searching for and wasn't sure I was going to find! Thanks!

[@JeffandLeslie]

Excellent info. Every photographer needs a backup plan and then execute that plan. Thanks, Steve, for posting this.

[@leafsfan71]

Thank you Steve, this was amazing. I just got a new laptop and was trying to figure out the correct workflow.

[@mikedavis1110]

Great demo and advice to save your files from a trip!!

[@andycoleman2708]

Very helpful! I've saved this video for my next trip so I can watch it again when I have photos to practice with.

[@robertpanick2660]

I've been doing something very similar for quite a few years now, with a few differences. - I've been using 256 GB SanDisk USB 3.0 flash drives. For me 256 GB has worked, but I realize that I'm eventually going to have to go to something bigger. The best part is they don't require any cables, they're even smaller, and surprisingly they even survive going through the washing machine (not that I recommend it). - I'm a Windows user so rather than use the LR backup on import like you are, I wrote a small batch file that copies the entire directory on the laptop to a USB drive. I do it again for the second USB drive. But the import of the catalog is essentially the same, except I stopped doing folders years ago other than the year. I rely on the catalog folders instead, it lets me have lots of different view of the images using smart collections. Still that was a nicely put together video that I'm sure others will find useful.

[@paulsahota1773]

Awesome Steve! Very timely for me as I’m struggling with this very issue.

[@apprenti45]

Great process. Nobody talks about it. I follow tout from France. Thanks

[@osmumos]

Thank you Steve for this tutorial. It is very clear!

[@nomadtravelphotos]

I had no idea you could import from another catalog! Thank you for this perfect instruction on backups and more!

[@ijoshpics0171]

Thanks for the great advice and tips, Steve. On a side note, that Lion's wallpaper is epic!

[@richardhamilton9053]

I use a program called 'Good Sync' to back up my external drives. It seems to work well for me. I usually back up once a week.

[@brandt_bennett]

A nice and informative video. Thank you for sharing. I always enjoy seeing how other photographers approach data management

[@kawaida21]

Good video,always insightful....unrelated query do you have any plans for a video on how and when to use flash for wildlife?

[@gunny2044]

Thanks for the information Steve. This answered a question that I've had for awhile.

[@juanramoncolonmorales9489]

Ones again thanks for sharing valuable information, I will be looking for the LR videos, regards from PR 🇵🇷

[@northdevonpictures826]

Thanks for this video , Steve, you're one of my go-to photography teachers. Aside from carrying extra quality SD cards, I was reminded to take an HD drive on my travels. Because you never know, right?

[@stevethompson8154]

Thanks! I've got many images on my laptop that i am transferring to my new desktop.

[@Raevenswood]

Hey Steve good video . I’m wondering if you have any suggestions for backing up when you don’t have a laptop handy. Example: out backpacking on a multi day trip it’s not feasible to bring a laptop but cards fill up with photos and video footage and if you fill all of your cards you are done filming for the trip. I saw one from western digital that can accept cards and download the files as a stand alone but western digital hasn’t been the most reliable hard drive manufacturer in recent years so I’m searching for other options.

[@TrueToad]

Great Advice Steve. I do basically the same with a final upload to Amazon Glacier for storage when I return home. I keep two sets across two Synology NAS locally. Glacier is not intended for sharing images but a low-cost recovery if stuff goes sideways. Glacier costs about 1 dollar per terabyte I like the fact Glacier services is built into my Synology NAS and is just a matter of a click to sync new images up to my Amazon Glacier account. Recommend You do a Video on Insurance for Camera Gear - I have about 70K of gear and is insured while in my home but on the road may be a question mark. Looks like you were shooting Sony....:)

[@JKPhotoNZ]

Not wanting to get bogged down in tech talk, I moved from external SSDs to external M.2 drives because of the improved speed... Helps that they're also much smaller and not much more expensive.

[@user-tv5dt3nm9y]

A very straightforward process, thank you. I was getting a little confused by your reference to the T5-1 drive being your primary drive, when it wasn’t. The primary is your big drive at home. T5-1 is one of the on the road back-ups. No matter, I got it.

[@rachelg7371]

He said the T5-1 is his primary External drive.

[@user-tv5dt3nm9y]

@@rachelg7371 Watch it again....

[@rachelg7371]

@@user-tv5dt3nm9y lol,

[@robertbutsch1802]

Clear and concise - another great video. A little off topic, but what do you do for disaster recovery? You mentioned moving photos off the external SSDs to some RAID system. If the location where your RAID is is destroyed (some natural disaster or whatever) what is the backup for that? Do you put all your photos somewhere in the cloud as well as on your RAID?

[@backcountrygallery]

I have an offsite backup as well - physical drive kept at a family member's house. I also backup my "finals" to the cloud, so anything you ever see of mine is backed up to the cloud for extra security. I'd backup everything that way, but it takes too long (I shoot faster than it can backup).

[@jameswhitehead6758]

A solid question. An incremental backup solution is the best option for offsite cloud storage. That way, if you get ransomewared and that file gets uploaded to the cloud, you can restore to an earlier point and only lose a little bit of data vs. all of your data. Replicating off-site to a second RAID or just uploading to Google Drive is not 100% foolproof because of this.

[@glynnelectric]

What is a RAID file storage system? Is it a holder for more than one hard drive?

[@akronflyer73]

For what it’s worth, huge improvement in the background music.

[@louaiello1493]

Great advice. Would like to comment I do nearly the same thing, however, I found 2TB thumb drives to be a bit easier to carry and a lot easier on the wallet. Since they are also solid state and no required cables, I think it's an alternate way of achieving the same goal. Excellent video quality!

[@backcountrygallery]

My only issue is that any 2TB thumb drives I've seen write at 100MB/s or less (sometimes way less), For how much I shoot, it would take forever to get it copied. Still, they are probably the easiest thing to carry!

[@bluejay3945]

Steve I need your help. I followed your instructions for back bottom focus control for my Nikon D5100. Just got back from Sicily. When I used the Ae/af lock button to set focus, the meter would show the red dot on various locations on the focus metering grid and not necessarily on the center of the focus grid.The dot could be a single area to the far right of the grid then if I repositioned and focused again I would get a center dot and maybe a top left dot together. It freaked me out. I did not change it because the pictures looked good on review. I just went through them on the computer and they are not bad. I just question whether I screwed something up. I expected a center weighted dot all the time not the random focusing. Thank you so much! I appreciate all the help

[@PeterLariviere1]

The process you describe here is really great and I am going to adopt this method to how I backup images...but one question. Do you also carry a copy of your image library or at least those images you would not want to loose from past trips? I have been leaving a backup hard drive of all my images in my work office but in 12 months I will retire and not have an off site backup location. So I have a laCie 2tb drive with jpg's of special images that I carry when we are on the road so if there is (really bad luck) a fire, flood, theft. in our home while we are gone at least or photos will be saved! Maybe I am being overlying sentimental???!!!

[@backcountrygallery]

I keep a set of images at home and one offsite, as well as doing cloud storage. If you don't have a handy way to do off-some, consider a safe deposit box maybe. I think off-site backup is critical, but I wound't want to travel with my main backup either.

[@PeterLariviere1]

@@backcountrygallery Ya the safety deposit box likely is the easiest off site backup option...thanks. Love your videos by the way.

[@paulsamuelswildlifephotogr6260]

Thanks for the vid. Worse case scenario, if I have a high number of reject images I normally like to import and cull the rejects directly on the laptop before backing up to external drives otherwise, it saves me having to cull multiple times on each drive ....have I got this right ?

[@vettepwr23]

Hi Steve. Great video! Does this work if you edit photos on the TS-1 drive using Photoshop in addition to LR before you get back home to import? This happens a-lot for me since my road trips are several weeks at a time.

[@IustinPop]

Interesting. I don't have a Win or Mac portable laptop, so I never thought of importing into LR and processing "on the go". Hmm, that would definitely speed up things…

[@chrismartin7594]

Hi I'm hoping to do a 4 day trek in Peru. So taking a laptop not going to happen. Is there anyway you can go from camera to hard drive? Thanks for the vlog.

[@KurtisPape]

Some good tips there, I will have to consider. But currently I use a Toshiba 2TB spinning drive. I had 1 for a decade now before I was into photography and has never skipped a beat, so through personal experience I trust these to be reliable so I have been using them for my photography, also the are cheap. But speed is definitely a concern for me, I really don't like going through these drives because they are so slow, what's the point of keeping images if you dread having to find them.

[@backcountrygallery]

All I know is that I've seen a lot of spinning drives fail on my workshops. Most of those people would say they never had a problem right up to the moment before the drive dies. Plus, the extra speed of an SSD is wonderful :)

[@cesarm8811]

So Steve, which SD or CF express card reader do you use to copy to your laptop. Once in your laptop you copy to your SSD drive correct?

[@rghurst]

I use a free app called Sync Toy. With it, I can set up actions to automatically copy/backup pictures files and LR catalog from my travel laptop to my two travel hard drives. My internal storage for my travel laptop is 1TB (separate from my 512GM system drive), and my two external HDs are 3TB. When I get home, I copy everything to my home desktop system and merge the "trip catalog" into my master catalog in LR.

[@rachelg7371]

Can I ask which SSD’s you’re using these days? I’ve researched reviews and still cannot decide. I’m a Mac user and want something reliable for my trips. Is there a 4TB SSD that you’d recommend? or stick with (2) 2TB? Ps, this video solved some of the mystery around how to deal with the Catalog when on the road and when returning home. Thanks so much!

[@backcountrygallery]

I like the Samsung T7 Shield - 4TB.

[@rachelg7371]

Thank you so much!@@backcountrygallery

[@rachelg7371]

It would be helpful to add links to the external drives, etc. 😊

[@EdBacon]

When copying files between two devices, I like to use a tool that does a verified copy. That is software that checks the integrity of each file. I do not believe MacOS or Windows has this built into drag-n-drop copies, they might by now. There are tools available for both OS that do this, and they can also do “difference copy” for efficiency. I wrote scripts that automate the copy of my PhotoLibrary image and my Lightroom folder between devices. I run them from my laptop daily when on a trip, often multiple times a day/night. My workflow: 1) load cards into Lightroom 2) run backup/copy script 3) do some field edits 4) load more images into Lightroom 5) run copy script before going to bed. Everything else is similar to what is described in this video. Note verified copy is needed when copying across devices because all of the data is transmitted between the devices. Each time data is physically moves there is some chance of an error and possible file corruption. An internal copy or move on the same device only rearranges tables used to access the files, your photo data does not get moved.

[@RAMtrails]

what company do you use to insure your gear?

[@silverpassion3588]

I thought your vid is all about direct saving of SD card to the drive without the need of an intermediate gadget like laptop

[@SouthTexasVet]

I’m just getting started, and rather than having a bunch of different folders for every outing, I think I’d rather just do one master folder set organized by capture date like Lightroom defaults to on import, then do all my import/trip/whatever organization through collections. My question is though if I just do “copy to” in Lightroom to copy it to my second drive, if I cull through a bunch of photos on my primary drive, won’t they still be there on that second drive and require more cleanup and work on my part? I’m using two T7s to work out of and the second as a backup and want to have them mirror each other so I don’t have a bunch of extra work to do cleaning up the second one. I have my library saved on the first “primary” drive and a folder for backup libraries on the second drive.

[@SouthTexasVet]

I guess I’m asking how is the easiest way to make my two drives function like a RAID setup, as that’s basically what I’m doing manually, but it’s very tedious. I wind up getting the primary drive the way I want it then deleting everything off of the second drive and re-copying to save time. Gotta be a better way.

[@backcountrygallery]

I think it's best to think of that second drive as an emergency backup. Lightroom doesn't sync to it in any way, you'd need third party software to do that (and I'm sure there are lots of options that will mirror the drive, maybe not like full RAID but it would get the job done). Personally, unless I'm running out of space, I just treat it as an emergency backup that I'll hopefully never have to use (never have yet). I also have a third drive along sometimes and I backup to that after I'm done doing any culling, so if my primary drive failed, I'd turn to that one. However, I don't always have time to cull, so the third drive is often a few days behind the other two. Still, as I mentioned in the video, it really depends on the trip. If I have a once-in-a-lifetime day, all three drives will have the images ASAP :)

[@SouthTexasVet]

@@backcountrygallery Thanks for the reply! I think a raid drive will be in my future but for now while I'm just learning and not really too emotionally attached to all my pictures working off the T7 drives will work well. I found that if I import to my main primary drive, then do all my culling, it's easy to drag and drop the folder for that days shooting into my secondary/backup drive. Still working through your secrets to wildlife photography and nikon autofocus books. Next will be the lightroom course and metering Ebook. You really do make some of the best resources for learning explained in plain, normal people vocabulary. Seems like I am learning something new everyday from your videos/books. If anyone is on the fence about purchasing any Ebooks I highly recommend them . I have them in my books app on my iPad and I can't put them down. Thanks again!

[@yosemitesam5662]

Hello Steve, can your process work with an iPadPro (2021)? I’m considering going that route instead of a new MacBook. Primary home desktop is an iMac. Also, I’m using T7s for SSD backup. Thanks.

[@gordonnorman8259]

Steve: Nice video... Is it possible that you are a Sony shooter now?!? If so, and assuming you are often shooting wildlife action at 20-30fps, you may find it beneficial to cull first with Photo Mechanic and then move the 3-10% keepers into LR for editing. For me and other Sony A1 folks shooting up to 10,000 images per day, this has been a godsend for productivity.

[@backcountrygallery]

Thankfully, I've had yet to have a day where I hit 10K :) I've thought about Photo Mechanic (I've used it in the past) and I might just go that route. Lightroom can be sluggish sometimes, although it's better than it has historically been. Using the embedded and sidecar option, I can quickly import and although I can't examine everything at 100% (Lightroom only grabs the smaller embedded jpegs form the a1 RAWs), I can do a quick cull and get rid of the obvious blunders. From there, I can have Lightroom make 1:1s overnight and pick up the edit the next day if I like. My problem with PM is that I believe it only pulls the embedded (large) jpegs from the RAWs - that's why it's so fast. However, I like to see how Lightroom is really going to render (I evaluate at 200% and embedded jpegs don't always hold up well, even if they are sharp). Still, I may adjust my workflow as time goes on. Or I might start shooting more Nikon again (I use both). :)

[@chadpeterson2033]

Agree with this process, esp for an A1 or other large MP camera. I use Fast RAW viewer for same purpose.

[@paulsamuelswildlifephotogr6260]

@@chadpeterson2033 Agree....import and review, quick cull to save doing it multiple times, backup to 2/3 external drives

[@zygmuntziokowski7877]

Do you use preset when you import the photos into LR?

[@backcountrygallery]

Just for renaming, not for developing.

[@bluejays5660]

Is it possible to transfer your photos from your cloud storage directly to your external drive?

[@backcountrygallery]

I don't see why not - a drive is a drive. However, I've had very limited luck using cloud services on the road. Most of the time I have barely enough bandwidth to check e-mail so uploading a bunch of pics is out of the question for me.

[@user-in1zb4vg9r]

@@backcountrygallery I have the camera set to save RAWs and low resolution JPGs. Maybe I will be able to upload the low res JPG's on the road, so if things go sideways the JPGs will be up in the cloud and I'll have *something*. Thanks

[@backcountrygallery]

@@user-in1zb4vg9r That would work :)

[@movieman2009]

If you do not have a laptop, can this be done with the newest iPad 's ?

[@exploretography]

Great advise.. on the road or at home, you have to back up your images and prepare for things to go sideways. Thanks for presenting this content so clearly and we really enjoy your videos!

[@petermcginty3636]

Thanks Steve, I just have 1 question. Why don't you just use OneDrive or Google Drive?

[@backcountrygallery]

Many of the places I travel have minimal or even no internet. Sending a days' worth of images to the cloud would take weeks.

[@klmklm-xb3yv]

What if you don't want to carry a laptop with you?

[@patricklindahl868]

Put all SSDs on different places, and try to remember where you put them :) But I would like to have such a SSD, that I can connect directly to my camera via USB and then do all the copying via bluetooth on my phone! Anyone that has invented that backup drive? Backup should be incremental ("Copy all new files, no questions asked") so I don't have to fuzz with "File already exist, overwrite?"

[@quicktastic]

Whoa. Steve switched to Sony?

[@backcountrygallery]

Added, not switched. I have my Nikon gear too. :)

[@quicktastic]

@@backcountrygallery Just joking. Glad to hear though as I eagerly await your impressions on the mighty Z9. :)

[@pianoman6639]

Steve I love your videos and books etc I just hope you don’t turn into a salesman for companies and products like AN and his wife

[@backcountrygallery]

I think the reason people follow me (at leas tone reasons anyway) is that I don't sign up for sponsorships. I've been offered quite a few from names you know, but I'm afraid it would take away from my impartiality - or at least that would be the perception. So, I remain happily unsponsored. :)

[@brandt_bennett]

@@backcountrygallery this is exactly why I watch your videos, and don’t watch the other channel

[@martharetallick204]

And now I have even more respect for Steve.

[@Raevenswood]

@@brandt_bennett there is another channel?😉. I find everything I need right here most of the time as well. ✌️

[@Mahesh99430]

Rightly said... External SSDs are way better than HDDs. Read and write speeds of SSDs are very fast and they are also reliable. The internal storage in laptops or desktops should be also SSD, then it considerably increases the performance of photo and video editing softwares. HDDs cannot match the performance of SSDs and they are simply not good for photo and video editing.