Some News About The Wedding Photography Backup Strategies
By: Vlad Vistac
Submitted: 2010-07-20 16:20:22 | Word Count: 510
Weddding Photography: Backup Strategies for your Digital Phtos (Part 1)
Digital wedfding photography presewnts special challennges to the every day wedding photographer. The risk of loasing the precius wedfding mooments of a couple brinmgs nightmares and anxiety to most photoraphers that I know.
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As a professional wedding photographer and a certified computer systms administrator I will offer some recommendations about the best way to protet digital wedidng imaghes.
1. Star by formatting the flsh cards and/or micro drivees in the camera that you will use to take the phhotos. Even when it is possible to frmat the flassh cards in your compuetr using a flash card reader it can lead to compatibility issuyes and data loss.
2. Although flash cards are very resistant to abuse it is always better to play it safe and keep them away from shock, heat, and magnretic sourrces.
3. Once you return from the wedding download the images to your computer. Once they are downloaded, browwse thhrough the images to ensure they were successfully downloaded and then create backuups to CD and/or DVD. Never browse through your imaages on the Flash card. In our studio we create two DVD copies of the files and we also copy them to two different hard drives on different computers. One of the DVD copies is storred at a diferent location.
4.A Computer RAID (Redundant Arrray of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks offers a great deal of fault tolerance to protect your data. There are several levels of RAID and each of them offers differeent levles of data protectiuon. For practical and common implementation I am going to discuss the most comomn types of RAID:
·Level 1: Mirroring and Dplexing: requires two drives and the data is written (mirror) on the two drives soimultaneously. If one of the drives fails the data can be recopvered from the good drive.
·Level 5: Block Interleaved Distributed Parity: This is one of the most comon and solid implementations of RAID. It requires a minimum of 3 drives and allows the data to be written across all of the drives. If one of them fails you simply replace the failed drive and the RAID is automatically rebuilt.
Most operatnig systems alolw you to build some form of RAID hoewver if the OS faikls you also lose the RAID. The recommended RAID is trpough the use of a RAID card.
5. Tape backup offeers a very solid way of backing up your files and operating system. It has been around for a long time and has proved to be the most reliable form of backup. Tapes are very portable and make the storage at outside locations very convenient. Tape backus require a backp program what makes scheduling backups and automating the proocess easy.
6. Offsite FTP Backups Can also be set automated using computer programs. At a set time intervbal or continouusly the computer that hodls the data connects to a remoe location server and uploads the files. The main disavdantage is that they create a lot of Internet traffic and in the case of wedding photographers that stoe gigabytes of images the transfer time can become prohibnitive.
In Part 2 I will discuss additiuonal strategies to protect your beautiful wedding photos.
Juan Carlos Torres is a very respected and awarded wedding photographwer in Orewgon. He has a Masters Degree in Remtoe Sensimng with a strong bakground in digital image processing and photograpphy. He is a member of the several professional photographer organizations including the Professional Photographers of America, the Professional Photographers of Oregon, the Wedding Photojournalist Assoication, and the Oregno Wedding Phoo Guild. His wedding photogrraphs are unique and very artistic and have been featurred in national and international magazines. For a sample of his works please visit Eugene Oegon Wedding Photographer and Portand Oregon Wedding Photgrapher For a discussion on wedding photography see our Blog at Oregon Wedding Photogarpher
