Backup strategy for wedding photographers

A backup plan for wedding photos in four stages: dual cards on the day, copies before you sleep, the 3-2-1 rule through the edit, and what to keep after delivery.

Write every frame to two cards at once, keep the cards on your body until the wedding is on two other drives, hold three copies on two kinds of media with one off-site until the gallery is delivered, and after delivery keep the finished JPEGs online plus the RAW files on one local and one off-site copy for a period you have put in your contract. That is the whole plan. The rest of this page is the reasons and the details, because the reasons are what make you keep doing it in November when you are tired.

A wedding cannot be reshot. Every other job you do has a second chance. This one does not, and the couple knows it.

Stage 1: on the day

Two cards, both RAW. Set the camera to write the same RAW file to both slots. Not RAW to one and JPEG to the other; a JPEG backup is a backup of a worse file. If your main body has one slot, that is the reason to change it before it becomes the reason you lost a ceremony.

Smaller cards, more of them. A card that holds three weddings is a single point of loss for three weddings, whether it fails, gets lost, or gets formatted by mistake. Rule of thumb: a pair of cards should hold about one wedding, so that a lost card costs one day and not a season.

Cards stay on you. A card wallet in a zipped pocket, not the camera bag. Camera bags get set down and walked away from. Shot cards go in label down so you never reformat one by mistake. Do not delete frames in camera; the space it saves is not worth the risk to the card.

The second shooter’s cards. Agree in advance: they hand you their cards at the end of the night, or they copy to your drive before leaving the venue and keep their cards untouched until you confirm receipt. “I will send them next week” is not a backup plan.

Ingesting at the venue. Not needed for a normal day. For a very long day or a destination wedding, copy the morning’s cards to a portable SSD during dinner. Keep the cards regardless.

Stage 2: that night

Before you sleep, the wedding is on two things that are not memory cards.

Copy	Where	When
1	Working drive, internal or a fast external SSD	Ingest as soon as you are home
2	A second local drive, a different physical device	Same session, copied from the cards, not from copy 1
3	Cloud backup or an off-site drive	Start the upload before bed; it can take days

Ingest with software that verifies the copy rather than dragging folders in a file manager. Verified ingest compares what was written to what was read, so a bad cable or a dying drive shows up now instead of in 3 weeks. Then open a handful of files from copy 2, including the last frames of the night, before you consider the night done.

Do not format the cards. Rotate them. Buy enough cards for 2 or 3 weddings so that a wedding’s cards can sit untouched until its gallery is delivered. Cards are cheap next to a reshoot that does not exist.

Stage 3: the edit, and the 3-2-1 rule

The 3-2-1 rule is three copies of every file, on at least two different kinds of media, with at least one copy somewhere other than your home or studio. It is the standard because it covers the failures that actually happen.

Failure	What saves you
A card dies during the ceremony	Dual slots
The camera bag is stolen from the car	Cards on your body
A drive dies	The second copy
Fire, flood or burglary at the studio	The off-site copy
Ransomware, or you delete the wrong folder	A cloud or off-site copy that keeps versions, not a mirror that copies the deletion
Your catalog corrupts	Catalog backups, kept under the same rules as the RAW files

That last one is the one most photographers miss. The RAW files are safe on three drives; the 40 hours of editing are in one catalog file on the laptop. Back up the catalog on the same schedule as the images, and keep it off-site too.

A working setup for most studios: a fast external SSD for current jobs, a large desktop drive or a two-bay NAS holding everything, and a cloud backup service running continuously from the desktop drive. Cloud uploads of RAW are slow on a home connection, and a wedding of RAW files can take a day or more to finish, which is why the upload starts the night of the wedding and not the week before delivery. An off-site drive swapped weekly with a friend or a family member is a cheaper version of the same thing.

Replace spinning drives on a schedule rather than when they fail. Three to five years is a common rule of thumb. Drives are consumables.

Stage 4: after delivery

Once the gallery is delivered, you have two sets of files with different value.

The finished JPEGs are what the couple paid for. Keep them online in the gallery, and keep them locally as well, because a gallery is a copy and not your only copy. We make FOCL Galleries, and the pricing follows this logic: unlimited galleries on every plan, downloads and bandwidth never capped, and storage the only thing that is counted, from 3 GB on the free plan to 2 TB. A delivered wedding of JPEGs is around 2 GB as a rule of thumb, so the free plan holds about one wedding, and a paid plan keeps a year of galleries online without much thought. Whether and when to take galleries down is a policy decision, covered in wedding gallery expiration policy.

The RAW files are your insurance against the couple wanting a different crop, a print lab needing more resolution, or a parent asking for a photo from the outtakes a year later. Decide how long you keep them and write it into the contract: one year, until the album is delivered, or indefinitely. Then archive to two drives, one off-site, or to a cold-storage tier of a cloud service, and stop paying to keep them on fast storage. Whether couples get those files is a separate question, answered in can clients have the RAW files.

Two versions of the plan

The minimum, for a photographer starting out:

A dual-slot camera, RAW to both.
Two external drives at home, ingest to both the same night.
One consumer cloud backup service running on the main drive.
Cards not formatted until delivery.

The full version, for a studio with a season of weddings:

Everything above.
Verified ingest software, checksums logged.
A NAS or large desktop drive as the archive, with the working SSD as scratch space.
Continuous cloud backup of the archive and the catalogs, with versioning.
A written RAW retention period in the contract, and an annual archive pass moving old jobs to cold storage.
A restore test every quarter: pick a wedding from 2 years ago and open 10 files from each copy.

Restore tests are the part nobody does and the part that matters. A backup you have never restored from is untested. Ten minutes a quarter fixes that. Delivery itself is a workflow of its own, in how to deliver wedding photos to clients, and the cards, drives and cables that make the day work are in the wedding photography gear checklist.