Cloud Backup for Photographers

As a general rule of thumb, photographers should follow the 3-2-1 rule: Keep three copies of all photos, with two on hard drives and one offsite. The first two are easy enough. You simply download the photos from your camera to the laptop and back them up to another hard drive. Offsite, however, was trickier until recently. Before, this meant storing DVDs of photos, but, today, photographers can use cloud storage systems to seamlessly back up their work.

When choosing a cloud, keep in mind they are not built the same and photographers might need a feature not available to the average user. The biggest one will be RAW files, which take up a considerable amount of space and aren’t accepted by a lot of photo clouds. These systems are built for the casual photographer in mind, so they only accept jpegs. Flickr is an example of this, offering a free terabyte of storage for image files. It also functions as a community portal to display your work, convenient for creating photo albums online and sharing images.

Dropbox and Google Drive are clouds that function as a synchronization folder to back up whatever you have on your local drive. These services are flexible, allowing you to choose which files and folders you want to sync, but the downside is storage area can get expensive. The alternative is a dedicated cloud like Amazon, which offers unlimited storage for about $60 a year, one of the best deals you’ll find if you need a large amount of space. A dedicated cloud functions like an external hard drive, but won’t do any automated syncing.

The best solution for photographers is to choose a cloud that accepts RAW files and provides an exceptional amount of space to store them. BackBlaze, CrashPlan and Amazon are popular general storage services, while companies like Smugmug, Zenfolio and Mosaic are built for photographers in mind, with features like digital portfolios, licensing, sales and printing.