People often ask me how I manage and protect the footage I’ve shot when I’m constantly traveling and moving from shoot to shoot. Back in life before Corona the first thing I would do when I got home from a shoot was dump my bags and get the backups going. I can’t relax until that’s up and running. Traveling with content after a shoot still makes me nervous, even after all these years. What if I lose the content? What if something happens to the memory cards? What if we get robbed and my gear gets nicked? These questions are always in the back of my mind when I’ve got a bag full of fresh photos, because it takes a lot more than just me and my camera to create the content for a shoot. A standard crew usually consists of two people doing production, at least one person for styling/makeup, an art director (sometimes), a videographer, a second photographer (sometimes), models, and of course, the client. It is the collective efforts of all of these people who make a shoot possible. And then when it’s done, all of the work we’ve created becomes my responsibility, something that even as a seasoned photographer still freaks me out. Over the years I’ve developed a system that works for me. Nowadays my camera has two separate memory cards, so every photo I take gets backed-up straight away, and if for some reason one of the memory cards decides to take a day off I know I have an alternative.
Coming home to find my computer working on a back up calms me. By the time I’m on my second cup of coffee and the second copy is underway I’m all zen. As the internet gets faster and more reliable I’m guessing updates straight to the cloud will become the new normal, but I don’t trust it yet, not completely. The gigabytes pile up pretty quickly when you shoot over multiple days, and dodgy internet connections and constantly switching locations and being on the move makes it hard to manage all of your content and get all of your files synced. So until our friend 'The Internet' becomes more reliable worldwide I’ll stick to my old routine of keeping copies on multiple harddrives, while I keep the originals separate from the harddrives, which I usually stash somewhere sneaky and/or give one to a crew member for safe keeping. It might seem like a complicated system, but it’s my job to make sure that the content so many people worked so hard on doesn’t disappear somewhere between the shoot and its final destination. So my advice is BACK IT UP! And find a system that works for you, that you know you can trust, no matter what happens.