First I have to say, there is not one “right” or “wrong” way to do anything. This method works for me right now, and I’m sure I will change it as time goes by. Take what you’d like from this post, and I hope it helps you take a good, long look at your workflow to see where any gaps might be so that you always have a solid backup plan in place.
Prepare for the worst case scenario with every single session. You never know what is going to happen — your hard drive could tip over on your desk and just stop working on a Friday afternoon like mine did! Follow these tips to always keep your images safe!
Tip 1: Don’t reformat those SD cards yet!
Keep all images on your memory card until you have delivered the final gallery to your clients. This saved me. Luckily I still had every single recent session on my SD cards so that I could go back, transfer the RAW files again, cull, and edit. Yes, I wasted time having to go back and do all of this work again, but I was so grateful that those images were still there.
Tip 2: Have a backup to your backup.
I own two external hard drives where I am storing all of my 2017 sessions. Honestly, I didn’t used to do this, but a friend walked me through her storage process last year after I had spent a very, very long time worrying about what would happen if my one lonely hard drive ever malfunctioned. So now I have two just for this year, and they are set up to mirror image one another once a week. My problem this time was that they hadn’t mirror imaged each other yet the week this all went down, so all the work I had done that week was gone. Clearly I need to change that setting and make it happen more often now! Once I get my hard drive back from the manufacturer, this will be the first thing I do!
Tip 3: And then back them all up online.
I had been putting off setting up an online storage account that a friend kept recommending to me, and the instant my hard drive failed I was kicking myself for not doing it sooner. But then I realized that a few of my “missing” galleries were actually saved online in Shootproof because my clients had requested online access for a few days to finalize their orders that we discussed in person. This was a total lifesaver, and I had all of those high-res, beautifully edited JPEGs ready to download because they were backed up in Shootproof. I plan on upgrading my account to the unlimited version, and I now upload every single gallery to Shootproof just for storage after I edit the session. First I save them to my external drive, then I backup to the backup external drive, then I upload to Shootproof. They are in THREE locations. Since I do IPS, I rarely use these galleries for clients to view, but now it will serve as an online library for me in case I ever need it again.
Tip 4: Allow yourself some grace.
You know the saying, “under promise and over deliver”? In this industry, many of us live by this motto, and I truly believe it is so important to always wow your clients every step of the way.
So when we tell our clients their images will be ready in two weeks, we’re really trying to set up their gallery reveal for 1-1.5 weeks from now so that they feel like we made their experience our top priority. I do this all the time with every single client! But sometimes you need to build in a buffer on the calendar and allow yourself a few extra days just in case you need to edit those images again, or in case you order proofs from your lab and there is a delay in shipping.
When my hard drive crashed, I had not yet started setting up my gallery reveal appointments for the sessions I had finished editing that week. This gave me a little breathing room when it came time to re-edit everything. Thankfully the clients still enjoyed their gallery reveal sessions n the promised amount of time, with just as many images as they would have received the first time around. My portrait clients will never even know that there was a glitch on my end because I was able to fix it in two days by following all of the advice I’m including in this post. Yes, I had to give up half of my weekend to recover everything, but now it’s all done and I can breathe easy again. Allow yourself some grace. This way you can still over deliver to your clients and continue to wow them every step of the way, even if the unthinkable happens.