Your wedding day is so special, you want to remember it, share it, and mark it as an important day for your family. That’s why backups of your wedding photographs and videography are such an important consideration.
Looking after your memories are one of the key aspects of our work. It is ingrained into everything we do. That’s why we don’t post or edit photographs on the day, we don’t do same-day edits for video or anything else that will compromise your memories.
Plenty of photographers and videographers don’t have backups, neither have they really thought about them either. Often, they are just working on a single laptop or computer, and have no plan for when things break.
What you must ask photographers and videographers before booking
- Do you back up my photographs and video?
- How long do you keep the backup for?
- What precautions do you take, to look after my wedding photographs and video on the wedding day?
- Do you back up the edited files and original files too?
- Where are your backups?
- What should we do as a couple to back up the finished files?
This is what we do
Q. Do you back up my photographs and video?
A. Yes. We have a comprehensive backup strategy, which starts at the shoot, and finishes after we have delivered everything. Every step between shooting and our final long-term backup has been considered carefully.
Q. How long do you keep the backup for?
A. We have the original files, finished files, and software to open them, for every wedding we have ever shot, spanning decades.
Q. What precautions do you take, to look after my wedding photographs and video on the wedding day? A. We shoot with cameras that duplicate each shot onto two memory cards. We don’t delete images on the day, we don’t edit images on the day. We do absolutely nothing to the files until they are properly copied onto our workstations back in our office. When we swap cards out, we pop one in the car and keep one on our person. We maintain this separation until we are back at the office. If we get on a boat, wedding bus, or go near the sea, we swap in a new set of cards. We also shoot with multiple cameras, which reduces any risk of loss.
Q. Do you back up the edited files and original files too?
A. Yes. We back up the original files, any files generated by our software, and finally the finished wedding photography videography files.
Q. Where are your backups?
A. Our internal backups are on two different workstations and one specialist storage system in our office. In addition, we maintain two different external offsite backups (in different continents).
Q. What should we do as a couple to back up the finished files?
A. We have written a whole blog post about this, but overall, you must make backups of any files your photographer sends you.
In principle, you need to have three backups, in three different locations, and preferably on different sorts of devices. For example, if you get a USB, copy it to a laptop, copy it onto your mum’s computer, and store a copy in the cloud (Google Drive or similar).
The next step is to check the backups work. The next step is to write a note in the diary to refresh the backups to new devices every year or so.