It’s not a matter of if, but when. There is never a good time for your hard drive to fail, especially your primary drive that you store all your weddings on.

That’s what happened to me last week, and I didn’t lose one image.

A back up system is a must when you are a wedding photographer. The images you create can never be recreated. I truly feel the images I create are worth so much more than I charge for them. So it is very important to have a rock solid backup plan.

I’d like to share with you the structure of my back up system before the crash, and how I have now changed my system after the crash.

First, we’re going to refer to this crash as “The Big Crash of 09”. It was quite scary when it happened. All of the sudden my hard drive that I store all of my wedding images on would not mount. Even after transferring the hard drive to all the different computers in the studio, it still would not mount. And after a call to tech support, it was quickly determined that the drive had failed.

My network of computers are all Apple, and Apple has a backup system called Time Machine which backs up all new information every hour on the hour. It really gives you a nice warm and fuzzy feeling. But when it comes time to retrieve that information, you have doubts as to how well the software has been working. You begin to question if the software has been working at all.

With each wedding I photograph, I make a back up of all the images I have created to DVD. I then edit those images down to the ones I want my customers to see, and then I back up those images to DVD. But how do you know that you have backed everything up? Even though my routine is very strict, you always have a nagging feeling that you may have missed something.

I was lucky this time, and everything had been saved using Time Machine onto a very large eight terabyte external drive called a Drobo.

Before the recession started, I had one person working with me in the studio, and because of this fact I had all of the studio images stored on a server for central access. But now that I am working by myself, I find that I really am no longer in need of a server, so I have now changed my backup system, which has added one more layer of redundancy.

Attached to my primary workstation, I have now added two external one terabyte drives, and one eight terabyte Drobo. Inside the workstation are two 500 gig drives.

So, now when I bring my exposed cards in from a wedding my routine works like this. First, I download the images to one of the external one terabyte drives. I then back up the raw captures onto DVD. The second external one terabyte dive is my back up drive, and is an exact mirror of the first external one terabyte drive. I accomplish this mirror using Carbon Copy Cloner.

As I have said, there are two internal drives as well. One is my startup drive, and the second is a mirror of the startup drive, again using Carbon Copy Cloner. This way, if the startup drive fails, I can still operate the computer and album production can continue while I wait for a replacement drive to be installed.

All four of these drives, the two internal 500 gig drives, and the two external one terabyte drives are all backed up ever hour onto the eight terabyte Drobo.

This then is the most solid backup system I have ever created for myself. A double layer of redundancy.

By Aric C. Hoek, owner and creator of Ten Houston Wedding Photographers