How to archive or backup your wedding photos & videos :

Have you anytime imagined the horror of losing your wedding photos/videos? 

Spending months & years planning every detail of your wedding day & waiting a whole lifetime to have it as a sweet memory by investing ample amount of time & energy, spending a fortune into your wedding experience?

Now, You have beautiful documentation of your wedding day, but how can you protect those memories for decades to come? And we can’t leave out a nightmare scenario: what if something happens to your computer and those precious images are gone forever? Who would want to risk that isn’t it? 

Being a professional wedding photographer at Vows, Here’s my master plan with four handy tips to help you safeguard your wedding photos and videos! 

Tip no 1: Three copy pattern 

As they say, prevention is better than cure. Make sure you follow a three-copy pattern of the entire data which your wedding photographer provides you. Because You never know when your hard drive would end up being lost or corrupted. 

Being in the wedding industry for 11+ years, we keep getting calls & e-mails from our clients asking if we have another backup copy of their data because most of them will lose it within 1-2 years. So, the more places your images are stored, the more secure they’ll be. (Sigh)! 

1st Copy stored locally, i.e., A Copy in Hard Drives/SSD at your place.

2nd Copy stored off-site, i.e., Hard drive/SSD at your inlaws place. Or any location you’re able to store a hard drive outside of your home.

3rd Copy On Cloud servers i.e Google Drive, One Drive ect

Tip no 2: Handle the drives with at most care

Never eject your Hard drives without clicking the Safe Eject option on your computer. This will corrupt the hard drive, and it might not mount back next time or lose its life span due to power failure. Now, the worst part is to get the data recovered from your Hard drive. You might end up paying anything between 5000-1000000 rupees. ( Isn’t that a scary sight ) ?

Tip no 3: Invest in SSD’s instead of HDD’s

This is one of the safest ways to keep your images backed up. SSD’s are much safer than the hard-drives. Though SSD’s are slightly expensive, but provide much peace of mind and are pretty reliable. 

So, how do you actually back up your images once you have your external drive? The answer is pretty simple. All you need to do is copy your wedding image files (copy, not move!) to your local computer to a new folder. If possible ask your photographer for a compressed set of images also along with High-Quality Set. The lesser the size, the chances are reasonably thin to lose because you cab have multiple copies faster

 Here is a couple of Hard Drive/ SSD's I highly recommend for a Faster and Safer way to preserve your wedding Files: 

Tip no 4: Online or Cloud Back up - The best cloud storage

Another solid step in your backup system is backing up your image files in the cloud server. Even though you have two copies in SSD's/HDD, there are high chances that you may misplace it or sometimes when you're away on vacation and want to cherish those images without any access to a physical drive. In such situations, the cloud copy will come handy.

Being an experienced wedding photographer with 650+ Weddings Here is our strongest & safest recommendations for cloud spaces are - iCloud, Amazon web service, one drive, Google drive, etc.

Now we are sure there isn't anyone without a Gmail id these days & hence let us help you set up a google drive account.

Steps that you need to follow: 

Step 1: 

We suggest you create a new Gmail ID on the couple's name, and it will provide a good 15GB of free space where you can store all the files.

Step 2: 

Next, you can download an app called JPEG mini which also provides a trial version.

Step 3: 

All you have to do is just drag and drop the Master Folder which your wedding photographer provides you into the JPEG MINI app.

Step 4: 

Set the size to medium & then click to proceed (make sure you uncheck the option to avoid optimizing originals ) TADA :D it will create a new folder with the same folder structure. 

Now, all you have to do is drag and drop the Folder to Google Drive or any other line of Cloud Servers. You can even share this folder with your Family & friends.

Tip no 5: Invest in a Physical copy of your photos/ Wedding Album.

Are you also like me who doesn't like the clutter of cables? And believes in Physical Copies over soft copies? Then Albums are the solution. They are one of the best forms of preserving your wedding day memories. I can go on talking about how essential wedding albums are. A wedding album does not require internet, software updates and doesn’t have the potential to become corrupted and crash. It’s a great heirloom that stands the test of time for generations to come. No subscription is needed. If you recently got married and your collection didn’t come with an album, chances are your wedding photographer in Hyderabad still offers beautiful albums and professional prints you can invest in. 

These little steps will ensure you’ve got clarity on peace of mind towards your data for the biggest day of your lives. 

And by taking a moment to follow the above steps and implementing a solid backup plan, you can be rest assured knowing your wedding memories will last a lifetime. I know technology and backups can be overwhelming, especially if something as simple as turning on your computer is a difficult task! So, if you have questions or want to chat, we’d love to hear from you :)