Back Up Your Photos (Revised)
April 23, 2025Those who know me or who have read some of my articles know that I advocate keeping photos on an external drive, preferably a solid-state drive or SSD. Access to photos is faster and all your photos are in one place.
But there’s one thing we also know – computer drives fail. Certainly not at the rate they failed only a few years ago, but any drive will fail at some point. And it’s almost a given that a drive will fail at a most inconvenient time.
Drive failure can mean the loss of data, and there’s nothing much worse than losing photos that we may have taken a lifetime to collect. So it’s only prudent that we have a strategy for backing up those photos so a drive failure won’t mean irreparable loss.
My Strategy
While it’s true that a drive can fail at any time, it is extremely rare – almost to the point of near-impossibility – that two drives will fail at the same time. So the most accessible solution is to have a regular backup of our photo library to a separate external drive.
Currently, my photos are stored on a 4TB Crucial SSD. Every morning at 2:00 AM, I make an incremental backup of my complete photo library to a separate 4TB SSD.
Carbon Copy Cloner
The tool I use for this backup is called Carbon Copy Cloner. It is designed to make an exact duplicate of a drive onto a second drive. That backup can be scheduled so, once set up, it is a completely automated process .
The interface provides easy setup. There are three icons that you click to enter
- 1) the name of your source drive,
- 2) the name of the destination drive, and
- 3) the start time for the backup and the regularity of backups.
Once a backup is completed, the same screen tells you the actual start time of the most recent backup, the total time elapsed to make the backup, and the number of files and total size backed up.
It is important to note that Carbon Copy Cloner does an incremental backup,meaning that it can detect which files (or photos) have been changed, added ordeleted since the last backup. The current backup only affects those files. So, although the initial backup can take a few hours, from then on, it usuallytakes only a few minutes each time. This, of course, depends on how often you have it perform a backup. In my case, it runs every day.
While Carbon Copy Cloner only works on iMac and MacBooks, an app called Acronis True Image is available for Windows machines and performs very similarly.
More Than One Backup
You can, and should, have more than one backup sequence. So in my case, I back up my main photo drive (Mike Worley Photos) to one destination (Photo Backup II) every morning starting at 2:00 AM. However, I also back up my main photo drive to a second SSD once a month on the first day of the month. This backup takes longer because it is backing up any photo which has been changed or added during the entire previous month.
It is important to remember that the source and destination drive must be attached to the computer for the backup to occur. In my case, I keep my monthly backup SSD in a fire-resistant safe, so I have a note in my to-do list on the last day of each month that reminds me to get that drive out and connect it to my iMac for the back up to occur.
Added Benefit
With Carbon Copy Cloner, you are getting an exact duplicate of the source drive. Additionally, the app creates a folder which contains each change in a file with the date the change was made. This exact duplication is important in the case of a failure of the main drive.
Since the backup is an exact copy (up to the time of the last backup), it is not necessary to do any type of ‘restore’ function. You only have to rename the backup drive to the name of the original source drive and you immediately have everything in place just as if the source had not failed – with the exception of any changes or additions made between the time of the last backup and the moment the original source drive failed.
So, for example, it’s 9:00 AM. I’m working on some photos when suddenly my photo drive (Mike Worley Photos) stops working. I determine there is likely some failure of the drive. All I need to do is rename the backup drive from Photo Backup II to Mike Worley Photos and restart the application – in my case, Adobe Lightroom Classic. Everything will be there up to 2:00AM that morning. Changes made from 2:00AM to 9:00AM – in our example – will be lost, but that’s better than losing everything and recovery is simple and straight-forward.
And Yet Another Backup
I want to be sure as I can be that I never lose my photos, so I don’t rely on just one backup or even two. The one I described with Carbon Copy Cloner is my primary backup, but I have others as well.
Apple iMac and MacBook come with a backup system called Time Machine. While this utility is intended to back up the entire hard drive on the computer, it can also be configured to backup an external disk attached to the main unit. I have mine set up that way.
Time Machine works in the background and, more or less, makes a continual backup of the computer drive.
BackBlaze
A couple of years ago, Scott Kelby introduced me to a utility called BackBlaze. For a fee of $50 per year, you have unlimited and continual backup to BackBlaze’s cloud servers. If necessary, you can download a recent backup or, for a small fee, they will send you your most recent backup on a USB stick.
Network Attached Storage
In a previous release of this article, I discussed Network Attached Storage or NAS. This is a multi-drive system that attaches directly to your network router. As such, it provides storage for any device that can connect to your network, even wirelessly. It can even be accessed remotely. Thus, any photo or other file can be accessed remotely and thus don’t have to be stored on a phone or tablet to be used while away from your desk. NAS can also replace cloud storage such as iCloud or Google Drive and thus save money in the long run.
At the time of the first release, Synology was the acknowledged leader in this field. However, in recent months, they have made some changes which negatively impact their viability, in my opinion. While Synology is touted for their software, there have been complaints about the sturdiness of their hardware. Regardless, a recent change requiring that the user only use hard drives purchased from Synology - at a premium price over other fully capable drives from Seagate or Western Digital - has taken them out of consideration for many.
Within the past year, another NAS provider has become a rising star. UGreen, long known for their superior cables and connectors, has entered the NAS market with several models. While UGreen’s software is not at the level of Synology’s, their hardware is acknowledge as far superior. Not only will a UGreen NAS take any 3.5 or 2.5 inch drive, but you can install operating systems other than UGreen’s own system without affecting the hardware warranty.
I recently decided to go with a small UGreen NAS with two ideas in mind. First is the feature usually touted for NAS systems - a cloud-like back up system without having to pay monthly for cloud storage. Second, and one of the draws for me as a travel photographer, is that I can upload photos directly to my NAS in my office from anywhere in the world where I have an internet connection. This ensures that my photos are safe, even if I were to have all my equipment stolen or damaged while traveling. I have my system set up so that not only are my remote photos stored on the NAS but they are also automatically uploaded to my desktop version of Lightroom Classic - ready for editing as soon as I get home.