The short answer: download your gallery the day it arrives, then keep three copies on two different kinds of storage, with one of them somewhere other than your home. It is the same approach photographers use to protect their own files.
Why do wedding photos need backing up at all?
A hard drive fails without warning. A laptop gets replaced and the old one is wiped. A phone is lost, a folder is deleted by accident, or a house fire takes the lot. Any one of these is enough when the only copy of your wedding photos lives in a single place.
Your online gallery is a lovely way to view and share your photos, but it is a delivery tool rather than an archive. Galleries can expire, passwords get forgotten, and providers change. Once your photos are delivered, looking after the long-term copies is down to you, so it pays to set things up properly from the start.
What is the 3-2-1 rule?
The 3-2-1 rule is a simple way to make sure no single accident can take your photos. Keep three copies of every file, on two different types of storage, with one copy kept off-site.
In plain English, that might be your computer, an external hard drive, and a cloud account. If any one of them fails, is lost or is stolen, the other two carry on unaffected.
Where should you keep each copy?
Your computer or an external drive at home is the everyday copy. External drives cost very little for the space they offer, and plugging one in once is most of the work done.
A cloud service such as Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox or Amazon Photos makes an easy off-site copy, because whatever happens at home cannot touch it. If you would rather skip the cloud, a drive kept at a family member's house does the same job.
One thing to avoid: a single USB stick in a drawer. That is one copy, in one place, on a small device that is easy to lose. As part of a wider set of copies it is fine. On its own it is exactly what the 3-2-1 rule exists to prevent.
When should you set it up?
The day your gallery lands in your inbox. Download the full set of high-resolution files first, before you start picking favourites or sharing, so the archive copy is the complete set. Make the other two copies at the same time, and then the job is done.
After that, a small annual habit keeps everything healthy. Pick a date you will remember, such as your anniversary, and open each copy to check the files still load. Drives can fail quietly, and an annual check spots a failure while the other copies are still fine.
What about prints and an album?
A printed album is the one copy no hard drive failure, lost password or expired account can touch. A set of prints or an album of your favourites works as a physical backup that also happens to be the version you will actually look at, so it earns its place twice over.
If you are planning your wedding and want a photographer who looks after your photos from the first frame to the finished gallery, get in touch and tell me about your plans.
