All hard drives and SSDs fail eventually, so every professional photographer needs a good backup strategy. But I learned the hard way that anyone at all with valuable photos on their computers should have a backup.

Twenty years ago, before I started event and headshot photography, I almost lost everything. My beloved white plastic MacBook (remember those?) had a sudden hard drive failure taking everything with it: my music, photos, documents, the lot. It was… traumatic. But I got stuck in with DiskWarrior, and it saved the day, I recovered almost everything and I’ve had a backup ever since.

I’ve gone through a bunch of drives upgrading and replacing but it’s always been the same simple strategy. In this post I’ll share my photography backup system including the devices, software, and services I use, and you’re welcome to adapt and improve it to suit your own photography business.

My photography backup system in 2025

The basic rule I try to follow is ‘3 – 2 – 1’. This means that you should have at least three copies of your data, on at least two different storage devices or media, with at least one copy in a completely different location, off-site

The next rule is to automate it. If you have to remember you’ll probably forget. I use a Mac app, Carbon Copy Cloner, to run a series of backups on a schedule; it’s got a great UI and documentation, with regular updates. You could also try SuperDuper!, another great app with active support.

And I like to keep it simple, so my full archive is on one high capacity enterprise-class drive, its backup is on a second identical drive, and my Mac backup is on a third drive, with two Thunderbolt daisy-chains keeping everything connected logically. With the archive drives I’ll plan to upgrade the capacity every 5-6 years or so and if they last longer even better.

What hardware & software do I use in my backup system?

Some of these links are affiliate links. The Backblaze link will give you a free month if you sign up to a paid account. As a member of the Amazon Associates program I may earn a commission if you go on to make a purchase from an Amazon website.

My backup system summarised

  1. I shoot on two cards per camera for redundancy
  2. I keep one set of cards in my pocket on the way home (i.e. one from each camera)
  3. I use LrC to import everything to an ‘Active Jobs’ folder on my Mac, creating Smart Previews on import to check for corruption
  4. Then CCC runs nightly: first it clones the Mac to its own backup drive, using a Safety Net to catch deletions
  5. Then it clones just the ‘Active Jobs’ folder to a corner of my Archive drive, with a Safety Net
  6. And finally it clones the Archive drive to its own backup drive, with a Safety Net
  7. Meanwhile Backblaze is always uploading the Mac and Archive drives to the cloud
  8. I only format my cards when I’ve confirmed the backups, and that LrC created Smart Previews without issue
  9. When the job is delivered I move it off the Mac into a ‘YYYY’ folder on the Archive drive (which then copies to the Archive Backup)

Step 1: backup during the shoot

Your photographs are your livelihood so your backup system should start when you make them, which is dead easy with dual-slot cameras set to record in backup mode. Don’t set it up to record raws to one and JPGs to the other, or to use them sequentially. You want the same files on both cards.

Having two sets from the start is great, but they’re both stored in the same place – your camera. So if you lose the camera during the shoot you’re stuffed. QED: don’t lose the camera during the shoot.

By the way if you don’t have two slots, that’s risky if you’re being paid for your work. Sure, the reliable card brands rarely fail – but they can fail, and images can sometimes corrupt as they write, without the whole card failing. They can also be easily damaged every time they’re removed and replaced, let alone dropped and lost or stepped on or eaten by the dog…

To use a dramatic metaphor, someone who’s never been in a car crash should still wear their seat-belt. So you should try to upgrade to a two-slot camera ASAP and avoid taking the second card out at all if possible.

BACKUP RESULT: using two card slots I now have two copies of each image from the moment of creation. But they’re all kept in one device, so I need to protect that device

Step 2: the end of the shoot

At the end of every shoot I take one card out of each camera used, pop them in a small SD card case, and keep it in a discrete pocket – not a jacket pocket because I might take my jacket off at some point on the way home, or it may simply fall out.

Now I have two copies in two different locations. I’m trying to avoid loss of images via loss of the camera – I might get mugged on the way home, or if my bag is in the car boot and I get rear-ended I might lose them that way (this has actually happened to someone I know).

BACKUP RESULT: now I still have two copies, but in two locations. Losing both copies at the same time is much less likely, but I should get them onto more robust storage ASAP

Step 3: import and create Smart Previews

Back at my desk* I use Lightroom Classic to import the cards to an ‘Active Jobs’ folder on my Mac’s internal SSD. It’s set up to create Smart Previews – this helps with culling speed but it also lets you know if an imported file was corrupted. So if I shot a conference for ACME on May 1st 2024 I’d have imported the raw files here:

  • Macintosh -> Users -> Owen -> Pictures -> Active Jobs -> 240501 ACME Conference -> 1-All Raws

* if I’m in a hotel for the shoot I take a laptop at least, and ideally an external SSD drive; I get the cards onto the laptop and the external as soon as I’m back to the hotel.

BACKUP RESULT: now I have one copy on my Mac, and two copies on the cards. It’s also the last time I make a manual copy – from now on backups are automated.

Step 4: backup the entire Mac

At half past midnight, every night, Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) launches and runs the first of several automatic backups. This first backup task mounts a dedicated external drive called ‘Mac Backup’, copies the Mac’s internal SSD onto it, and ejects it at the end.

The first time CCC copies a drive it has to copy the whole thing and that can take a long time – around two hours per terabyte for me. But every time after that it just copies the new stuff and deletes the stuff you’ve deleted – sort of.

In fact doing a straight copy including deletions is dangerous. If you accidentally delete something on the source but don’t realise until after the next backup it’ll be gone from there too. RUH ROH.

So what CCC can do instead is keep those deleted files in a sort of safety net. The actual process depends on whether your drive is formatted with HFS or APFS. If you\’re using the latter CCC uses ‘snapshots’ to catch deleted stuff. On HFS it moves all the ‘deleted’ files into a root folder on the backup drive called ‘CCC Safety Net’, where they’ll stay until the whole drive starts to run out of space. Then it starts deleting the oldest files in the net to make room. My Mac is 4TB and the backup drive is 6TB so I’ve got at least 2TB of headroom for ‘deleted’ files on the backup.

Apple’s Time Machine does the same sort of thing on an hourly level (although you can make CCC run hourly too), so if you’re using TM you’ve already got this protection. However, I don’t think you can just plug a Time Machine drive into another computer and access it like a regular hard drive, which I may want to do with my laptop if my Mac died. So Carbon Copy Cloner works better for me than Time Machine.

BACKUP RESULT: two sets, or four including the SD cards: one set on the Mac, one set on the Mac backup drive, and two sets on the cards.

Step 5: backup the Active Jobs folder

Once the Mac backup is done CCC starts another. This time it clones just the ‘Active Jobs’ folder from my Mac to a root folder on a second external drive, again keeping a Safety Net of deleted images just in case. This second external drive is my ‘Archive’ drive that stores all my delivered work; more about that in the next step.

This step probably isn’t necessary, but it’s a simple addition to Carbon Copy Cloner’s task list that provides another layer of redundancy and also helps automate some housekeeping in a later step. If it’s possible to have a favourite backup automation task, this is mine.

BACKUP RESULT: three sets, or five including the SD cards: one on the Mac, one on the Mac backup, one set in the ‘Active Jobs Backup’ folder on my Archive drive, and two sets on the cards

Step 6: backup the Archive drive

Once the Active Jobs backup is done, CCC starts a third one! This time it’s updating the Archive drive to a second identical drive (called Archive Backup) in a separate enclosure, with a Safety Net again.

My Archive drive contains all my delivered JPGs going back around 20 years, plus all the edited raws going back two years; I find I very rarely go back to the raws after that (if at all), so after two years I only keep them for things like weddings and family portraits.

By the way, I keep these backups in their own enclosure separate to their source in aid of the ‘2’ in ‘3 – 2 – 1’ – the source and the backup should be two completely separate devices at the very least. If they’re both in a two-bay enclosure for example there’s a chance the enclosure itself could fail (or get dropped, coffee spilled on it, etc) potentially losing both the drives in one go.

BACKUP RESULT: four sets, or six including the SD cards: Mac, Mac Backup, Active Jobs Backup on Archive, Archive Backup

Step 7: create an off-site backup

While all this is going on, Backblaze already started backing up the contents of my Mac to the cloud, giving me an off-site backup.

Backblaze is running 24/7 and it’s unlimited so I backup just the Mac and the Archive drive. I’ve also got their ‘versioning’ feature turned on for up to one year, so it saves changes and deletions going back that far. Backblaze takes a while to upload a full shoot, though, so I don’t count on it until it’s done.

BACKUP RESULT: five sets – or seven including the cards

Step 8: only format the SD cards when all the previous steps are done

All of this happens overnight, Backblaze taking the longest as it’s limited by my upload speed. When Lightroom Classic confirms all the Smart Previews and all the backups are complete, that’s when I feel safe to format the cards for the next shoot.

I know some people use multiple sets of cards they rotate through, so they have that extra set of backups for longer. But I’ve got five copies at this point so I’m good to go.

BACKUP RESULT: five sets: Mac, Mac Backup, Active Jobs Backup on Archive, Archive Backup, and cloud/Backblaze backup

Step 9: deliver the edited photos and consolidate to the Archive

Once I’ve edited I deliver to the client by uploading the full res edited JPGs to my unlimited Pic-Time account where they will remain for as long as I’m a Pic-Time user.

Now I’m ready to archive the shoot on the Archive drive, and remove it from the Mac. To avoid human error I just wait until one round of backups after delivering the job, which copies the completed shoot folder to ‘Active Jobs Backup’ on my Archive drive.

I verify it’s all there, then I just move the shoot folder into the appropriate YYYY folder, all on the Archive drive. Then I delete the original folder from my Mac’s ‘Active Jobs’ folder. That night the backups run as usual and everything will be in its basically-final backup state.

I hang onto the unedited raws in the Archive for now, but for most things they get deleted after a couple of months at most; I will keep the ones from headshots and weddings for longer, just because those are the only sorts of jobs anyone’s ever asked about them.

I keep the edited raws for at least a couple of years usually, but I’ve never needed to re-edit anything older than that (if at all) so I only tend to keep them longer for weddings. And I keep the final client JPGs forever.

BACKUP RESULT: three copies of the edited raws – Archive, Archive Backup, and Backblaze; four copies of the edited JPGs – Archive, Archive Backup, Backblaze, and Pic-Time Unlimited. 

What about RAID in a photography backup system?

If you’ve done much research into backup systems you might be wondering why I don’t use RAID arrays for either my storage (source) or backup (destination) drives. It just seems like overkill for my needs and potentially more hassle than it’s worth.

My main concern is the hassle of rebuilding an array with high capacity drives, hitting a read error and the whole thing failing, hassle I can’t be bothered with. So as I tend to upgrade every five years or so, and drives will likely be higher capacity by then too, for now I decided to stick with a pair of LaCie 1big Dock enclosures with a 24TB enterprise drive in each one, the largest possible at the time.

It was around the same price as a similar capacity using RAID, and effectively gave me RAID1 (mirror) functionality without the hassle of using RAID software or putting it all in one enclosure. If either of the drives in my 1big Docks do fail I can very easily slide it out, pop a new one in, and copy everything back from the surviving drive, just like in RAID1.

Is RAID right for you? Maybe, everyone’s different. I just know I feel better without RAID involved.

Remember: a RAID array is not a backup in itself, it’s just insurance against one of the drives in your array failing – you still need another copy of the data on a second device or array. However, you can use a RAID array as your storage device or your backup device, so long as it’s one array each – not one array sharing both jobs.

Is my photography backup system fool-proof?

Throughout my workflow I never have just one copy of the images. Further, once all the backups have run every night I have at least three copies, on at least two different devices or media (e.g. one on my Mac SSD, one on an external spinning drive), and I have at least one off-site copy (Backblaze).

Can you spot any vulnerabilities? Technically there’s at least two:

Firstly, my local backup drives are always connected and the backups are automated. So there’s a risk of corruption on a source being automatically copied to all the backups.

However, CCC does do some verification when it copies stuff, and won’t ever copy something it detects to be corrupt. You can also periodically run a VERY lengthy checking run that will get rid of corrupt files and overwrite with a clean version if one exists on either drive.

Secondly, my only off-site backup is reliant on: a decent internet connection; there being no corruption on Backblaze’s servers; and easily getting it all back if I need to. They can ship you hard drives, or you download manually from their website. However, I’ve read stories about that sometimes being tricky.

A personal experience: ten years ago ago I bought a new iMac and tried to move my Backblaze backup state from the previous iMac over to the new one on their website. There were constant errors, and Backblaze eventually told me it was impossible because the entire backup was effectively corrupt due to age at that point.

After I’d emailed several variations of WHATTHEFUCK at them the message seemed to be that it was my fault anyway because I should have been wiping my backup with them and starting from scratch every couple of years. Which isn’t something they point out when you sign up, and isn’t very practical, for me at least. So why am I still using them? I guess I’m taking a calculated risk here.

The more basic off-site solution is to buy a massive hard drive I copy everything onto once a month and then store… somewhere… off-site. The problem is I have no family here, no friends locally, no office I can take stuff to. So short of keeping it in the glovebox of my car I’m not sure how to handle that.

I’d also likely have to remember to do it manually and I just don’t think I’d remember. I think the chore of doing it would mean it didn’t get done.

But, apart from this small calculated risk, my backup strategy for professional photography feels robust and keeps me safe from almost all direct threats – you’re welcome to borrow it for your own purposes.