Backup Costs for Photographers: A Survival Guide

Wouldn't we all love to keep every photograph we've ever taken?

Not just the keeper shots, but every missed shot too! Every missed focus, every foray into hand-held one-leg tip-toe slow-shutter earthquake photography, every shot of a person whose expression and demeanor is so bland you might as well get them out of the way and make the brick wall behind them into a subject instead. Just in case a photo ends up being important in the future!

Of course, we're not amateurs, those rubes who find themselves content with the comforting simplicity and space efficiency of JPEG files. We're professionals, dammit! We must shoot and store everything in RAW, just in case a new editing technique we learn years down the road allows us to reveal the hidden beauty in a photograph that's languished for years in our private collection.

Storage companies reserve the very best of their wares for us esteemed professionals. We massage our egos with shopping carts full of solid state drives labeled with the three letters reserved to us and us alone — pro. We address the cashier with a self-satisfied smirk and a request for an invoice.

We read the invoice. We read the invoice again. We clear our throat. We did hear about AI making storage costs skyrocket, but man, that new 24-200 F1.2 lens purchase will need to get put off for a few months. Maybe a year. Only one thing matters now: don't let the cashier see you cry.

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I'm Nestor, an accredited software engineer with years of experience in tech and a very keen interest in photography.

Data Retention Basics

Ideally, you want to keep your data long-term, so storing your photos just on your local machine isn't enough. You should be preparing for contingencies. Things happen, many things which are often not your fault, or sometimes anyone's fault. You shouldn't let those things destroy your life's work.

Three backup copies, two different media types, one off site. This is the "3-2-1 backup rule". 

The first copy is the photos on your drive, the ones Lightroom sees and works with.

A second copy should live on an external drive or a NAS. The drives on your computer can fail catastrophically and without warning.

A third copy should exist off-site. Not at your house, because fires enjoy melting drives, moving trucks will vibrate your hard disk drives to death and burglars make a beeline for anything shiny and technological.

Off-Site?

Here's the funny bit. Chances are, you're already storing photos off-site.

Are you uploading your pictures to Instagram? Maybe Flickr? Congratulations, you already have an off-site backup. When you pressed "upload", a copy of the photos left your house and now lives in Mark Zuckerberg's house. Isn't Instagram amazing? (Jokes aside, do set up two-factor authentication for your social media. Keeps your backups safe, keeps your professional image intact.)

There's one issue though. Using some social media website as a backup is a bodge. It's not a full backup solution. It won't let you download all the photos you wanted to backup in a structure that mirrors the workflow on your device. If you've been working longer than you've been using social media, you can't just dump all your archival photos in one go. Crucially, it's not professional.

Off-Site, For Real

I cannot recommend giving your data to a professional data storage service enough. They won't lose your data. I understand that they have to disclose an infinitesimally small rate of data loss, but, trust me, they won't lose your data. Besides, this is your third copy, right?

Truly professional off-site backups are a tiered scale problem. At a given scale, the cost of storing your photos off-site can be easily ascertained. If you grow beyond your current scale, the next tier up costs a lot more. If you shrink your scale, the tier below you costs a lot less. Let's put some numbers to this to demonstrate.

<20 Gigabytes: iCloud, Google Drive, Mega. It's free! Do be careful; some of the free tier backup solutions will delete your data if your account is inactive for too long.

<1 Terabyte: ~5 USD a month. Not great, not terrible.

<30 Terabytes: ~30 USD a month. Starting to sting, isn't it?

>30 Terabytes

You've got two solutions here.

The first one is too technical if you're reading this post for data retention advice. For about 2 USD a month per terabyte, you can get an Amazon Web Services S3 Glacier Deep Archive instance. Cheap, right? Well, for one, it's really difficult to use because S3 does not come with a traditional backup widget for your desktop. It's also restricted to one retrieval per year.

The second one is to start calling up sales teams. At your scale, you are looking at those "Enterprise" tiers with a "Contact Sales" button you've always been too scared to push.

Here's an article about preparing for difficult conversations and here's an article about managing panic attacks. You can do it, champ! Try to not cry, pass out or otherwise embarass yourself when the sales specialist on the other end of the line gives you a quote pricier than your mortgage.

Here's what you're thinking. You can't afford this. There's no way. You'll just buy as many drives as possible, copy all your files, store them in a closet, forget about them for years and years. That is not a solution. Those drives will degrade on their own. You will come to mentally rely on them working, and precisely at the worst possible moment, they will fail you.

This is an intervention.

I lied. No photographer needs more than thirty terabytes in storage. If you need more than thirty terabytes, you do not have a capacity problem, you have a hoarding problem.

A 100-megapixel Hasselblad produces 200 megabyte RAW files. 30 terabytes is enough to store 150 thousand of those photos. Hasselblad guesstimates their shutters last about 100 thousand actuations.

I've heard tales of photographers with collections over 80TB large. They simply never delete anything at all. They started photography and whenever they ran out of storage, they simply bought more.

Here's how you know you have a hoarding problem:

1. You keep obvious rejects, no matter how bad.
2. You tell yourself you'll go back and re-edit old RAW photos, and never do.
3. You think you might need your images for historic preservation.

Here's the difficult truth:

1. Your sense of self is so over-inflated that you think even your rejects are gold. Nobody is that good. Not you, not me, not any of our favorite artists. Cherish the lessons you learned from your rejects and delete them.
2. You will always keep taking new photos, and you barely enjoy editing new ones as you take them.
3. A 5 megabyte JPEG for anything you might want to keep for prosperity will do.

The greatest victim of your hoarding habit is yourself.

When you keep all your rejects in the same place as your best photos, your best photos become hard to find. This is another tiered scale problem — the more files you have in a system, the more you encumber the data structures that enable search and filtering. This applies to Mac Finder, Windows Explorer, Capture One catalogs, Lightroom catalogs, everything.

When you're in a habit of buying new storage all the time, you become more inhibited during shoots. The cost worries you, or you're nervous about going home only to find out there's not enough space for you to transfer your photos and edit them. This takes your mindset out of the process of creating art and hinders your creativity.

The cost of keeping all your rejects at maximum quality pushes you towards a cheaper, substandard backup solution or towards having no backup at all. This risks all your great photos, solely because you refuse to part with your bad ones.

A way out

The most important thing to recognise is that the problem won't solve itself. Nobody is coming to save you. If someone comes up with a utility that auto-deletes all your obvious rejects, you'll refuse to use it, and rightfully so. It's a problem you created for yourself and a problem you can fix for yourself. It's something you should do incrementally, in small batches. Take the time and reminisce on all your old photos and the great times you had taking them as you clean up your storage!

Here's a few tips:

1. Anything delivered to a client more than a year ago is fair game for deletion. It's good practice to have a retention policy, as it is polite and professional to send a deletion notice before you do it.
2. Use the organisation tools in your catalog manager software. You don't have to use keywords and descriptions for everything, you might not even need the star system. You might be avoiding deleting things because Lightroom takes forever to delete things — use the Rejected flag (X on your keyboard) and wipe all the rejections immediately after delivery.
3. Speaking of organisation tools; Lightroom has a filter for photos you haven't exported! Anything in inactive projects more than 6 months old that hasn't been exported is something you'll never export.
4. Anything mediocre (around the 2-3 star range) you should export as a 5 megabyte JPEG with a long edge of 1200 pixels, and then delete.

As it pertains to storage, diligently cleaning up your data will shrink your usage down by one or more tiers, saving you a boatload of money and making your business more resilient to storage pricing fluctuations. The current solid state storage pricing fiasco is only one in a long history of medium-term painful price increases affecting everything from storage to chips in general. Keep a sane photo retention policy, and be thankful you're not a videographer. Those guys are screwed!

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Not bad for a first blog post, eh? Only been a decade and a half since the last time I wrote to a blog.

Got any ideas for retaining policies? Did you dig yourself out of a photo hoarding hole? Did a client embark on a scorched earth campaign when you deleted their 5 year old photos from Pixieset? You'll find the comments down below!