Hi, I'm Adam and welcome to First Man Photography today we are talking about
backups and workflow it's just so easy, so so easy for your workflow and your
backup solution to become messy and disorganized and I have fallen foul of
that recently just through being very busy it's not really what I was
concentrating on and I became vulnerable because I didn't have copies or backups
of the work I was doing it for me and my business that could be terrible and I'm
sure even just losing photos of your family and things like that is pretty
disastrous for many of us so I'm going to talk through my backup solution and
my workflow and just to give you a flavor of how I do it and see if you can
take away some tips and tricks and ideas of how you might formulate your backup solution.
Before we get into that though this video is sponsored by Squarespace
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So it's very easy with backup just to become disorganized
you've got dusty drives like this all over the place and you don't really know
what's stored on where when it was stored for the last year or so this is
what I've been storing my stuff on and I need a better solution and follow the
theory that I've had for a while about how you should back up your work so the
first theory of good backup solution is to have two copies two copies of the
work you are creating so you are not vulnerable to losing that. Cards fail
hard drives fail, computers fail everything like that so you don't want
to lose it just because of a technical failure so
from the start, I'm out in the field and I'm shooting my work I'm taking pictures
I'm filming video I'm creating audio as well and as soon as I possibly can I
want to create two backups of that work. In cameras like the Canon 5d mark IV you have
backup in the camera itself but with things like this drone or the slightly
cheaper and lighter canon 800d these only have one SD card so after I've caught
that footage on one of those devices I'm always nervous until I get home or where
I'm staying to dump that data onto my computer generally I
put it on to my laptop. Some laptops these days have quite small hard drives
in them so something like this what is it a 500 gigabyte SSD drive is very
handy to carry around it's light its small but still packs a decent punch and
it's actually quite fast as well so I will dump the data on to them and I
then can relax a little bit because then I've got two copies, I've got one in
here or on my laptop and then the second one is still on the memory cards so I'm
a little bit less vulnerable but that will let me then move on to the next
step so depending where I am and how I'm doing things I will then generally edit
the footage because I'm a little bit more comfortable I can start to work
with it to see what's worth keeping what isn't sometimes I can edit straight
off these sometimes I like to edit as much as I can off my laptop hard drive
just because it's faster and that then is my final work whether it's a video or
a picture and I can then upload it as well to wherever I'm sharing it whether
it be YouTube, Instagram or the clients and then I know there is also
another copy out there it's at this point I've become a little bit
complacent recently because you then need to archive that footage into a
external hard drive or a server of some description. That means that you've
then got that footage stored for long term when you may need to reference it
in the future until recently I've been using this five terabyte hard drive here
and it's not bad for general storage but when you want to re-edit your footage
straight off that drive it is quite slow because it's just one single Drive so
recently I have upgraded to this this is the Drobo 5D3 I think it's the
Thunderbolt 3 version of the Drobo and it works in RAID 5 which means that you
put several disks in there and it writes the data to each disk at the same time
meaning that it can be faster. The more drives you've got in there the faster it
will be as well I've got three in there at the moment and I'm gonna upgrade them
as I need the storage space but that's a really nice solution with a thunderbolt
3 it means I can edit footage and the pictures off there really quickly
because Thunderbolt 3, it's got that speed and it's even good enough
to edit 4k footage straight off that so one of the reasons
I needed to buy the Drobo and it was painful paying for it because it is
expensive but the more you and more and more that you create the more you need
to store and it's just a painful necessity of being a creator but you
don't want to lose that data and I don't want to delete it either so having this
Drobo system has solved my problem despite the pretty scary expense of it
the other good thing about the Drobo is that if one hard drive fails you can
just pull it out stick another one back in and your data is safe providing that
redundancy however whether you are using a Drobo or the separate hard drive you
need to then backup that hard drive because you just don't know when that
device on its own will fail so although the Drobo has redundancy in there if the
Drobo itself fails you still lose all your data so you need to backup what's
on the Drobo or the hard drive I'm using this Seagate drive at the moment to back
up onto the one single drive and then I've got other stuff stored on separate
hard drives so I've got an archive of my work over the years and then everything
is also sat on the Drobo. I'm backing up the computer to the 8TB hard
drive as well using something like time machine.... if you're on a PC use something
like Acronis but it is a necessary step to backup your external drive or your
main storage drive whether that's internal or external it doesn't really
matter so then we're on to the third and final stage which is to somehow get
off-site backup there's a few ways of doing this but
you need to safeguard against fire or theft I'm currently using a service
called Backblaze which is the very simple set up and forget and it just
backs it all up to the cloud there are other options like your Amazon Prime
which will store all your photos you've got Dropbox and Google and Apple...all those
cloud services that are now available but as your storage needs increase so does
the cost. Backblaze is good though because it's one price for unlimited
data and then you can just restore everything later on if the worst was to
happen now once you've done that you've got a pretty solid backup solution and
you should be good in most circumstances there is however another
option and that is to very simply print them there is a theory flying around
that human history is in the most danger it's ever been in because everything is
now digital and if we were to suddenly lose the digital world wouldn't be any
record of the last 20 odd years or all of human history generally because it's
all on computers so printing it safeguards against that.... whatever that
may be but apart from anything it's just really quite fantastic to print your
photos out and you should be doing that anyway I created this diagram a
little while ago that just sets out and lays out everything I've been
talking about and shows you all the steps you want to take to get a solid
backup solution anyway please do share this video with someone that needs to
hear it I do not want to hear any horror stories of people losing their footage
or their pictures or anything like that so back up back up back up share the
video to help people out right before we go I just wanted to give you a little
update about what I've been up to I haven't been out shooting a vlog for a
while I did the review of the Fuji camera last week which you might enjoy
check that out here however I when I was out in Scotland doing the Glencoe vlog I
felt that was a pretty decent video it was some epic scenery I've got some
pretty good pictures and I just didn't feel like I could follow that up so I'll
followed it up with a few more practical things and that's just kind of how my
creativity works so I'm moving forward I'm gonna be ramping things up very much
so in April stepping away from a few other things that I've been doing as the
channel starts to grow and I want to put more time into it to create more videos
I'm not quite sure how I'm gonna work it at the moment but it's definitely gonna
be more than one video a week and so if you have any ideas of videos you want to
see things you want to see me doing places you want me to go to please leave
a comment down below and let me know what you would like to see I want to
create content that you want to see there'll still be vlogs, still the reviews and
tutorials and things but I'm looking at doing a few other things one of which is
I want to start telling the story or your story so
with that in mind I've done it a couple of times before but I want to start
collaborating with you if you have a good story an interesting story an
exciting story that you want to share you want me to share I'd love you to
come onto the channel we can go out together make some pictures together
have a good time and you can come on the channel and promote whatever you want to promote
so if you're interested in that please head over to the website at first man
photography com send me an email give me a little bit of background about
yourself and I will have you on the channel as soon as we can go through the
rigmarole of getting that organized but I want to expand the channel a little
bit into a few other things different genres of photography a little bit more
often as well so there's lots of good changes coming from April onwards but
i've got a busy March because I'm moving house if you follow me on Instagram as well you will
see the move of the studio because this is in my house and I'm moving first
man photography HQ to a new house and a new location in the next couple of
weeks so follow me on Instagram and I'll share some of those stories anyway before
we go this video is sponsored by Squarespace if you haven't heard of
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first purchase. It really is worth checking out anyway I hope you've enjoyed this
video and I'll see you on another one very very soon I'm hoping to get out to
film a vlog this week for the next video so I'll see you then I'm Adam this is first man
photography in the studio
Out!!