I have always been taking backup seriously. I regularly backup my photos, both to several external hard-drives (I am a big fan of the 2TB Western Digital Passport series), RAID-enabled network disks and cloud storage. Still, given that I haven’t experienced a drive failure in more than 10 years, I have not been as diligent as I should. And just after Christmas I experienced the nightmare when my primary disk suffered a complete mechanical failure.
Trying to restore my photos, I discovered several things (that in hindsight are obvious):
- You need to backup the Lightroom catalogs just as diligently as your photos.
- Saving metadata (pressing ctrl+S) in Lightroom to generate .xmp sidecar files should be second nature
- Take an old disk and try to restore photos once in a while. Being able to restore your photos is perhaps the most important feature of your backup regime!
So, have you backed up your photos and all the associated metadata this week? No? Go and do it! Today!!