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Oh man have I been there done that! Replicated corrupted data is a nightmare. Offline solid state back ups plus data integrity checked Time Machine backups, plus cloud galleries that are unsynced and static. Long term data management is a deep rabbit hole. I so feel your pain TonyTone!

Great video, Tony - thank you very much! So sorry for your loss (we felt your pain). In a seminar years ago, an IT expert advised about backing up digital media - get in the habit (at least annually) of migrating your data to the next-best most secure storage available and have an off-site location. ChronoSync software really helps as you syncronize your drives. Your recommended use of battery backup power conditioners is spot on. I use 5 (from APC). Electrical spikes and sags can wreak havoc on sensitive micro electronics. The videos you and Chelsea produce are great!

This is such a good summing up of the situation. I have made 5 family albums but discovered some corrupted images in the process, which is incredibly sad. I laid out the albums in Affinity Publisher, exported the high res PDFs as well as email quality, and distributed these to family who can decide to print from the high res versions if they want. But after watching this, I realise even more the need to back up twice, in different locations. Thank you Tony!

So sorry for this event! Thank you for sharing with everyone!

I have been an IT person for over 20 years. I shot my first wedding for a coworker 7 years ago. I used a Canon 5D with 2 memory cards. After the wedding I backed up all my memory cards to my computer and then to an external hard drive. The next morning I left on vacation to go camping. I received a call from my neighbor at 2:00 am telling me that my house was on fire and the fire department was cutting a hole in my roof to let the smoke out. They busted out all my windows and threw all my computers and electronics out of the windows. When i got home my Mac was sitting on a pile of debris with water dripping out of it. My external hard drive and memory cards were in another soaking wet pile. I was devastated. I lost everything I owned except for the clothes I took on vacation. I found all the memory cards and my 2 hard drives while raking through the debris. I put them in a bag of rice for a week. I had to call my coworker and tell her that all of her wedding pictures were in the house during the fire. After a week i connected the hard drives to a USB device and amazingly I was able to get 100% of my data. Even the memory cards still worked. I learned a huge lesson that I should have been following, being an IT person for over 20 years! Get those files offsite ASAP. The 3-2-1 backup strategy simply states that you should have 3 copies of your data (your production data and 2 backup copies) on two different media with one copy off-site for disaster recovery.

Once a year , I go through all my kids pictures on my drives and make an old fashioned hard copy photo book and have backed up pictures on different drives - Thanks for this video lost memories sucks - I am in my 50’s and getting to the age I think more about memories and not the things we have acquired - When we are on our death bed I want to remember those moments while having headphones listening to music - life is all about memories with your family friends and moments -

In my early days of selling computer stuff, I heard and remembered a quote "There's data you've backed up, and data you haven't lost yet". I try to backup my photos on my desktop, laptop, wife's laptop, Google Photos, and photobooks I've created and had printed. Only saving grace in my case is my total storage is under 1TB total. Oh, and when I worked at an actual office vs home, I kept a backup drive there too. Anyway, great video. Thanks very much. As for a (lame sauce) horror story, I lost the photos I'd taken for my brother-in-law's wedding a few years after the event, and it was maybe another decade later my brother-in-law found the CD backup I'd made for him at the time and I was able to get the photos back.

Thank you for sharing, great suggestions. I am 65 and have been preparing negatives, slides, prints, (to digital) to be passed on to the next generation. As they are backed up, clouded, ... I need to make sure my kids have the codes and directions to all the files...thank you for motivation to take care of business.

Sorry to hear, like you its just happened to me. 20 years of work and memories. I will now place in multi locations. thanks for a great video

Thanks Tony for the wake-up call. I had never heard of bit rot.

Great info, as always, Tony. I think all of us - pro or enthusiast, must find the best way (that suits the individual) to address backup, recovery, and loss. I don't think there's any one way that's the correct way. Each photographer should find what works best -- from a perspective of value, cost, time, and importance. I'm not a fan of cloud storage -- but I'm only an enthusiast. For me, it's simple -- I don't store any photos on my desktop (or laptop) PC. After every shoot, I copy the contents of the memory cards to an external drive (connected to my desktop). Note - If I'm in the field for an extended shoot, I bring an external drive and copy the contents of the days shoot to that external drive, connected to my laptop, each evening. The external drive is backed up to my local Synology DS 920+, and a make a backup of the external to a 2nd external (then store the 2nd external offsite). At this point I have 3 sources of the photos (not counting the memory cards). I don't format the memory cards until I've confirmed the files on the Synology and the 2 external drives. I do all Lr/Ps post processing from the desktop-attached external drive -- not the fastest method, but then again, I'm not a fast editor. And, I replace the external drives every 3 years. Is it perfect? Nope - not even close. Do I sleep well? As well as one can, I suppose. I end up with my complete NAS backup - original and edited files; another copy of the edited and original files on the desktop-connected external drive; and a copy of just the original raw files on the non-connected external drive. For me - this sysem works. Like most of us, I don't go back and view the hundreds of thousands of old images on my drives, with any regularity. I just don't have the time. But I hope that keeping my external drives fresh, on a 3 year rotation minimizes the chances of storing corrupted files. Thanks again for the insight, detail, and passion. Truly appreciated.

man so sorry to hear this Tony. You've really got me thinking about this ....

Use a NAS that uses ZFS as a file system, since zfs has built-in bit rot and data integrity features. We build large enterprise storage SANs with sensitive data, all built on ZFS. In 18+ years haven’t had a single corruption issue with high io storage devices. I don’t remember the last time I had to do data recovery.

This is why I got into Freenas (now truenas) which uses ZFS which uses scrubbing to protect against bit rot.

Sorry for your loss. A hard lesson to learn.

Oh damn I was thinking about my backups and boom your video pops up!

Spot on Tony, and timely too. Only two weeks ago I had a massive storm where a very close lightning strike meant we lost power for just over two days, and flooding caused all sorts of other problems. I have at least one UPS on almost all my pc and tv equipment, but I was only using it for power, not for the network cables, so the lightning strike ended up frying my WAN port on the router (connected from the modem by a long network cable, which picked up the lightning RF), so once I got power back it took a while to work out the issue. One very scary part was that without the router, I couldn't know if I lost my 12TB NAS box, as it was hard to get it to boot, and I didn't know if I lost it all for ages. I'm currently organising my online backup, which will be terribly expensive, but I can't afford to lose it all. Your bitrot reminder is very scary though!

Currently I just have external harddrive, now I need to rethink of my backup storage. Thank you for this informative video.

Wise words from a wise man. Thank you for all the videos you've made over the years, I just started about a year ago with the DSLR and can't imagine how difficult it would have been for me to piece together all the information that you put in your videos. Thank you.

Excellent video that takes the world of IT and crosses it with the wonderful world of photography. I currently use the Adobe cloud to backup pictures and Acronis cloud to backup machines along with my own Synology NAS which has pictures. I don't have anything close to what you have in terms of TBs, but even 1 photo is worth a lot.

Tony thank you for sharing this story and sorry you lost precious memories. I burned out my Dell XPS hard drive and home media server. Took to PC Fix who recovered almost all images. Upgraded PC memory and new WD EX4100 16TB NAS server. Use Amazon cloud backups. Bit behind on memory books but now motivated to continue from your story.

So sorry this happened to you. Thank you for teaching.

I don't know enough about jpeg compression to really understand, but since it looks like the corruption on the images "starts" some ways down the images, I'd be really curious if there was some way to go into the image and manually start flipping bits in the data associated with the specific pixel it "starts" at (assuming that can be identified), and see if it can be fixed. I'd also be curious if raw files, presumably being uncompressed, would be affected the same way, or if a flipped bit would instead just appear as a messed up single pixel. (And if so, maybe compressed raw would be affected though)

Excellent video, Tony, thank you for the tips!

Funny that you made this video after I had an issue with memory cards. Fortunately I didn't lose any pictures. My issue was that I started out shooting on a Canon APS-C camera and of course those only have 1 memory card slot. Last year I bought an R6. Of course those have 2 card slots. I use 2 Sony Tough cards in it. Last Saturday I was shooting and my camera stopped taking pictures. I thought one of the card became corrupt. I was smart enough to have listened to you Tony about keeping more cards handy. So I swapped the cards out and kept shooting. I got home and checked the cards. Come to find out my second Tough card was full! I had never deleted the old photos from it because I didn't realize I had to switch between cards to delete everything. Luckily I have everything backed up on an external HDD and 2 cloud serviced. So no more lost pictures. Thank you Tony and Chelsea for drilling the 'carrying the extra cards' into me all these years!!

I back up only new files or files where the date or size has changed. That means an error inside the file will not be duplicated to the backups.

Also IT background. I've been running a ZFS storage array with two drive redundancy (RAIDZ2) for years now and it has been rock solid. I run pool scrubbing monthly and it has from time to time detected and corrected bit rot. One of the Amazon services I've been taking advantage of is free photo storage for Amazon Prime customers. This includes RAW photos too. My workflow works something along the lines of: Import from SD to laptop. The Amazon Photos app runs in background monitoring my pictures folder. I also sync to my ZFS NAS. On another system, I have the Amazon Photos app download to another system. I think run a hash calculation on both the NAS and the downloaded photos. When cleaning an SD card, I hash those files and if that hash exists on BOTH Amazon and NAS I'll delete just that file.

it is quite remarkable how often your photos get corrupted, especially on external drives. I had corrupted files very soon after copying them on the drive. Once I even discovered that whole directories just disappeared

Thanks for the reminder and sorry abut the lost files. I set my Lumix G9 to record to both SD slots and save the files to two external HDDs attached to a desktop PC. Cloud storage would be a good tertiary option, but I could also periodically save to a third external HDD that I stored in another location (I'm not dealing with quite the volume you are). Years ago my travelling companion and I had all of our camera gear and over a dozen rolls of exposed but undeveloped film from a trip to Utah and Colorado stolen (apparently by a parking valet at a high-end hotel in Denver, but the issue was never resolved). It still bothers me so I can imagine how frustrated you feel, but at least we have the memories (but of course we still want the images)!

Fantastic content! Professional Photographers of Washington just published an article I wrote about "Digital Decay." With the usage of cellphones and reliance on social media for photos, I strongly encourange people to print their pix and backup. I dropped a 4Tb hard drive--bye bye to all client pictures prior 2017! I now backup to 2 external harddrives. A lesson was learned!!

Hi Tony, Great topic and probably overlooked 99% of the time. Suggestion, get a nice computer rack to house all your network equipment. You always do everything first class.

Automated backups are good for short term (1 or so years), and decent manual backups to bare drives are good for important older data. I store those bare drives in a fire/water resistant safe. For short term backups, a DIY NAS setup, will have options for periodic automated scans for corruption, especially for many ZFS setups. On my PC, I have 6 hard drives, 2 M.2 SSDs, and 2 SATA SSDs. Since I also backup to a NAS, I use more of a JBOD setup on the PC. Then for data that is not easy to replace, I keep manual bare drive backups, which are easy to do with a USB 3.1 SATA dock. For automated backups, make sure you have versioning enabled, and have it for bulk media and basic documents, have a separate backup pool that enforces versioning without deleting older versions. Since they are unlikely to be changed much, it will not cause space issues.

Had a programming teacher who said, “Blessed are those who make backups of backup”. I would always have a running backup and one stored in the bank vault. Macs use a concurrent backup. But to be safe, have a separate folder the Mac never uses. So, basically you have a concurrent backup on the backup drive and a separate folder that contains the photos. (X2). Much harder if you take thousands of photos weekly but it that’s your income, then invest. Memory is cheap cheap cheap compared to 20 years ago.

Hi Tony: I had an external HD become corrupt this past summer and because I back-up each night to a second locate drive it also became corrupt. As a result I couldn't access my LrC Catalogue or images. I never let my HD capacity go over 80% full so this wasn't the issue. We had some power outages over the summer and I think that these events contributed to my issues. Fortunately, I also store all of my images to Back Blaze with the 1-year version option selected so I had them send me a new HD with my 235,000 images on it. I dodged a bullet but I am still very careful when I look at them back-up strategy. Great PSA video. Everyone should be mindful of this topic. It is not a matter of if my HD fails, it is a matter of when. Cheers, Keith

I'm sorry for what happened Tony. This is why i always PRINT the photo that matter the most to me

So sorry to hear, heartbreaking. I use M-Discs as my ultimate archives. Future plans are for a zfs based NAS.

Really sorry for what happened, Its a real bummer loosing those early pictures. The older the images become the more precious they are. Grandfather, father and son copies, one of them off site is the golden rule of digital backup from my early days in IT. Would advise separating and keeping JPG copies if cost of storage is an issue. Better a lower resolution image than no image.

Very good advice there Tony, also coming from an IT rich background I’ve seen plenty of the old writable CD and DVD’s turn to custard after a few years , very dependant on brand. Ironically the slides my folks took in the 1950’s of us kids still look good so long as all those other catastrophes you mention don’t befall them. Fully agree that as you get older and people pass away it is great to be able to look back. Cheers Chris from NZ

I feel bad for you Tony. You said you cried at the beginning and I believe it. I can still see the hurt on your face even in the video. Thanks for sharing your story and helping us become better photographers.

I'm sorry to hear about that! Data loss is a real nightmare. I feel the urge to check on my files asap... After my NAS and the cloud, my third way to backup photos is actually Blu-Ray discs! Optical media rated for a 100 years. If my files are intact at the point I burn them to the disc, bitrot is rather unlikely. I keep the discs in my basement which is basically a bunker, so they are relatively safe from fire or other disasters. Of course this is only for long term storage and not for files I use regularly.

Some great advice there. You can never have too many backups. I too keep photos on my memory cards until I`m certain they are backed up. The importance of a good power supply is very true. I did lose some images one time, photos of a friend with his classic car which he no longer has. They just disappeared from my hard drive! How I don`t know but fortunately I came across them on an old CD I had backed them up to using my old Amiga computer! Don`t know if those CDs are readable now but at least they are backup up on other devices now. Thank you again for valuable advice.

You've convinced me to move a few hundred GB of photos onto my one drive 365 subscription considering I pay for it every year, So far I've only had a handful of individually corrupt images over the years

Extremely helpful video, thanks!

This was very comprehensive. Excellent content.

Damn that sucks :(. Thank you for the knowledge. My daughter is now 9 and I have taken thousands of pictures over the years and need to do this ASAP!

What a nightmare. I'm so sorry this happened to you guys. I use a similar backup system to yours: multiple Synology DiskStations, BTRFS, SHR-2, multiple locations. I don't think most people appreciate the importance of using enterprise-grade drives like the WD (HGST) UltraStar models. The error rate on them is exponentially lower than consumer drives. Instead of the expansion units, I use three DS1821+ units which I regularly sync to each other using GoodSync with checksums to ensure data integrity. I physically transport one of the DS1821+ units back and forth to a second location to sync with a third DS1821+ to keep the units air-gapped. Whenever I replace the drives in a DiskStation, I take the old drives and copy data onto them with the intention that they will never be touched again except in case of emergency. If I had unlimited funds, I'd set up snapshot replication...but I don't. If I dealt with as much data as you, I'd also look at LTO tape. The tapes are surprisingly archival. The drives are expensive but the tapes aren't bad. They're ransomware proof too.

This is why I really like the Flac format for music. It has built in bit rot detection, tools can automatically scan flac files for corruption.

So sorry to hear of your data loss, its always the cobblers with no shoes. My Synology NAS suffered a drive failure due to an electrician flipping the wrong breaker. After replacing the bad drive I added a UPS.

One of the main reasons I'm using ZFS for storage at the moment, with scrubs every other month to check everything for corruption and to correct it if needed. With spinning disks I've found that basically since around the time they introduced shingled magnetic recording reliability has gone downhill (even on non SMR disks). I have old 1-2 TB drives that have been running for years and return less corrupted data than brand new drives of similar size. Using a filesystem that can recover corruption combined with regular scrubbing of the disks, and to basically not sync files older than a few weeks from your PC (that probably uses a filesystem that won't catch corruption) to the storage server anymore really helps prevent issues for me. Also I don't know the current state, but iirc btrfs did have issues with raid5 or 6 type usage when I last looked into it allowing data to get corrupted. Also, don't have the backup server "mounted" on your system as network drive or network source by default, set the server up to initiate the connection to your PC to get the data. That really reduces the chances of ransomware getting to the data

I came out OK, but despite living in the burbs, out of flood, earthquake, and forest fire zones an urban wildfire blew up here (Louisville, CO) at the end of 2021 forcing me to evacuate with about 30 minutes notice. I grabbed two backup drives (and a bunch of gear), but missed another drive and all my printed photo albums. I was looking into cloud storage when Tony posted this, good timing. Upshot: Backup, but have a plan and checklist for what to grab if you have to leave at a moment's notice.

Film photographers also would send half the film from one of the two cameras to be processed, wait for the results before sending the remainder of film. Also one of my instructors would process one sheet of 4x5 film at the beginning of his shoot before continuing to shoot.

Great tutorial on backups. Although I do multiple drive backups, I do plan to get a small Synology system. I also do cloud backup on Google Drive for client files. I don't have as much as data as Tony and Chelsea but still enough for multiple TB backups. For important shoots, I keep multiple SDs with original files of images until backups are done before re-formating SDs. Sandisk Pro SDs are cheap at 32GB and 64GB so I buy enough. The more SDs you have, the less each is over written over time which increases life of SD. I have had a few corrupted SDs before.

Last year I lost a 1TB drive with lots of media on it. I don't yet go to the extreme of off-site storage or fire/waterproof safes, but I decided to make multiple copies of files past a certain age and spread them across various drives (Laptop, NAS, Desktop, Google Photos and older drives that I leave unplugged in a closet). Since HDDs always get larger, every time I upgrade, I make a new copy from a verified-good backup. It's pretty manual, but it hopefully prevents the automatic backup of corrupted files.

I'd like to start doing annual photo books this year to counteract this. Even with triple back-up updated regularly, I have no trust in digital storage anymore, and physical media is much more gratifying to go through. I used to do individual prints of my best photos, but I have so many envelopes of prints that photo books seem like a better option in the future. No one will go through your hard drives when you die. They'll be happy to leaf through a photo book, though.

Thanks for reminding me - I have bought enough space on G-Drive to at least upload a couple of thousand of my "best" images as RAW - but have to be honest forgot to do it. I will now actually dedicate a couple of hours in the weekend to finally do it! 😊👍

The best advice you have given, fortunately, although I had a laptop that suddenly failed, I was able to remove the hard disk and transfer. Not had any failure of cards, though now I am tempting fate. I always transfer SD cards to iMac or SSD Sandisk drive. Still have thousands of negatives though that are in their protective slide sheets. However, will invest in further back up, i Cloud looks promising. I did know, after being a geek like you, that digital storage can get corrupted over time. All the best, thanks for the reminder! Share you sadness, that is a photographers nightmare, it is like robbed and having all your equipment stolen when insurance could not be afforded. Yep that happens.

I‘ve lost a film roll from the wedding of my very best friends, who relied on me taking good photos from that event-I absolutely know what you are talking about. I‘ve also seen several hard drives suddenly crash. It’s not the question if such things happen, it’s only about when-and you’ll never know that in advance. By the way, having one redundant backup system is not enough. I have seen two redundant raid-5 systems electronically fail in two days, so before the first of them was repaired … 1 TB of photos needed te be recovered from tape.

In some ways, that is where old fashioned film photography is superior to digital. I still have a very thick album full of negatives from 30 years ago still intact. Nothing beats making prints, and keep them somewhere safe. Favorite past time might just be having to look for that one photo, only to be flooded by the many memories from THAT album you look through every now and then.

I'm so sorry Tony!!

I haven't had a hard drive failure in quite a while (knocking furiously on my wooden desktop). I have had memory cards fail, but not with anything on them (again - knock wood). They just suddenly couldn't be recognized by the equipment or computer. I do make redundant backups of my memory cards as part of my work flow - a back up to external USB drives, a backup in the cloud, and two copies on my working drive in separate folders and working only from one of those folders. Memory cards are too expensive for me to keep around, so the handful that I have get reformatted between projects once all the back ups are done.

Thank God I used to back up to archive quality DVDs I had a PC crash about 10 years ago and lost everything or so I thought till I went through a box of data DVDs . The disc on top was the latest back up of my photos. It contained all but some of my oldest images which were on another disk deeper in the box. I now use a plug in hard drive and 2 cloud services. Every once in a while I’ll get nostalgic and burn a disc of the latest files

Great video. I have exactly the same setup using two Synology NAS devices (onsite+offsite) sync together and cloud backup to iDrive using Hyperbackup (Versioning enabled). In addition, my data is physically located on two different continents.

Good and sound advice. I use DAT (Direct attached storage) which will back up to my on line Backblaze account. For less than $10 a month you can get unlimited storage for one computer and all its directly attached storage. My DAT is a 5 bay Drobo set to double redundancy. That unit is backed up locally to a Sinology NAS on my internal network at the house which also is set to double redundancy. Everything in three places - the two local storage units using RAID set to double redundancy.

Lost all my son's grad pictures from Simon Fraser University in BC. A suggestion for videos like this which is basically aimed at pros. You mention the one thing I now advise my non-photography friends to do 1) use the picture books offered by Facebook 2) use other picture book services. Make a picture book at the very least every five years for those photos that are important to you. I would suggest your suggestions for the non-pro's appear earlier in the video before you nerd out on equipment. I almost went to sleep when you were showing all your cool gear, I just hung in there to hear the "cheap" suggestions. I bet most non-pro photographers won't make it to the end of this video. But suggestions for non-pro photographers earlier in your video and totally nerd out at the end for your pro subscribers.

I'm old so I can speak from personal experience to back in the film days when we used to have two photographers to cover any wedding giving us multiple views but also two rolls of film from two different cameras cause not only were there film process failures but camera failures on site happened as well. We had a rule of backups of equipment in extra flashes and camera bodies for each photographer and backups for film with multiple camera backs, backups were always needed and are needed now more than ever. Oh and also one other point. If we lost a roll of film due to processing we only lost 15 frames (120 format film) out of the hundreds that were shot on a full day, not at all like the unimaginable risk of a single 256mb flash memory card with the complete day on it.

Tony! So sorry you lost a lot of those photos! Thank you for this video, and I've got to say, you and Chelsea DO NOT AGE! You guys look amazing! Curious question: Which camera did you use to make this video? My assumption is your Sony A1. If I were go guess lens, I'd say 50mm f1.2? I could be totally wrong, but just guessing. Reason I ask is due to the hunting in the AF in sporadic points of your video. I know Sony's AF is amazing, but if I'm wanting to open the aperture to F1.2 on any camera, is the AF performance just destined to struggle? Also, I wonder if the bright background had anything to do with it? I'm so curious! I'll run tests with my R5 to see if the same thing happens. Thank you again for the video!

I have been there. The backup solution I use now is an incremental backup. Only new photos are backed up and are copied to an external drive and a NAS. So if I run in to bitrot, at least one of the two backups should have a clean file since once the photo has been backed up, it doesn’t get copied again on the next backup. After watching this, I am going to ad a cloud backup to the mix also.

Interesting how the digital age has made things like this more complicated and costly than in the analog age. Great benefits with digital, to be sure; I would not be using a camera now but for today's digital options. This is a worthwhile presentation, Tony. Thanks so much for creating and sharing it.

For real Tony?? OMG, that's heartbreaking.. backups of backups of corrupted photos.. what a NIGHTMARE!

Thank you Tony!

I had a hard drive crash in 2013, and I didn't have a serious backup strategy. Now I have a 100T off line back up facility where I back up photos and videos at least twice a month, and often once a week. I lost All the photos that I took that year. Fortunately I had prior photos backed up already through dumb luck on another computer. Now i have a system, and that system seems to work pretty well. I'm thinking of doubly backing up photos, but haven't done that yet.

Hi Tony, Sorry for your loss. As much as I know quick format deletes only the content table of the card but not the pictures so you can try to recover them with recovery software for deleted files as long as you do it asap after the format.

A great video. I have 3 independent back ups. I have back up drives connected to my computer all the time. Soon as I get back from a photo shoot I put everything on the external back up drives. I also every few weeks back up those drives to some more drives which are only connected to the computer during back up. I have a bank safe so 1set of drives goes into the safe, another set I have at home for easy access in case of a natural disaster or fire so can grab them easily, if I am here at the time it happens that is. I never store any photos on my computer's they are all on external drives,, not connected to the computer except the one used to initially put the photos on from the cameras memory card. So even if my computer was hacked, broken or even destroyed I would not lose my photos. I also every year or two buy new drives to replace the oldest ones for more peace of mind. I also don't use cloud services as anything connected to the internet has potential to be stolen, no matter how secure they are supposed to be. If you photos are that important do not ever use cloud services.

Computer Information Systems degree, but professional cinematographer and wedding cinematographer here. This is so key, personal and business. My personal/business setup includes a QNAP 72TB ZFS NAS system with a UPS as well. As a business owner capturing footage that cannot be re-shot, a data backup is probably the most important aspect of your business. There is way too much on the line. The QNAP has Hybridbackupsync that allows you to back up footage to multiple online providers like Google Drive, Backblaze, and Onedrive. Once the footage has been shot, I upload it immediately to a Google Drive Workspace account. $12 per month per user and unlimited data. That way, if anything happens to the server locally, that data is up on Google's servers and can be re-downloaded at any time. From a personal perspective, it is true that we should be printing our photos and making albums.

Easily the most useful video I’ve ever seen… didn’t know Bit Rot was even a thing.

You might want to try reading your images with different software packages. I'm a software engineer who used to write low-level JPEG code long ago. Some JPEG software will just abort if a single bit is wrong, and either the whole image or all the image past the corruption will be lost. For many corruptions, JPEG software CAN be written in a way to recover and decode the rest of the image. You will end up with a little defect in the image, like a 8x8 block (or streak to the end of the the line) of garbage pixels, which can often be fixed up in Photoshop. JPEG also often stores the chroma separately from the luminance data, so serious corruption of the chroma data may still allow recovery of a black and white image. Corruption of JPEG files is not a binary thing, there are many gradations of how damaged is it.

Thank you for this great video. I’ve been going to do all this for years but haven’t done it yet. I’ve taken millions of pictures as a hobby and don’t have a backup of most of them. Most of them are only on old SD-cards. I’ve been using them since 2004. Only one of them has been broken so far. First step that I have been trying to do is copy all those SD-cards (maybe 100 cards or so) to my 6 Tb external hard drive that I bought 3 years ago. But it’s still almost empty. It takes about 2 hours to copy one 128 Gt SD-card so it’s just too boring and too much work so I haven’t done it yet. I’d rather walk around in woods with my camera (or cameras) always when I have free time. It’s easy for me to search for wildanimals for 10 hours in forest but difficult to copy files for 2 hours. :)

Great video, thanks!! With your RAID (and hopefully file-checksums), how often do you schedule data-scrubbing? I still hope that with Synology's data-scrubbing+checksums, the bit-rot problems might at least get recognized before I overwrite my backups. But I'm interested if you think monthly/quarterly scrubbing is enough. Thx

Thank you for this video. You did a great job demonstrating that even if you practice the 3-2-1 method of data backup, you can still have bad data replicating through your backup system. Did you ever figure out where the source of the corruption occurred? Did it happen long ago when you put photos on external HDD's? Then when you upgraded to a more sophisticated NAS you were just copying bad data? Is there a way to review all your pictures in bulk to make sure that they retain their original data integrity? I am naive to this, but I would think that each file would have a CRC check or something equivalent that would alert you that the data is corrupted.

Very good reminder of the multiple risks. I now use a Drobo and Backblaze

We use Synology racks now. We just upgraded to backups too. Data integrity is super important.

Wow, this is horrible news. So sorry it happened. The problem came about because hard drives were the only foundation for the back-ups. For still photos and family videos, I feel everyone needs to upload to a website separate from their hard drive solution. I have uploaded my finished JPGs from every commercial and personal shoot since 2008 to Zenfolio. I am so glad I have those pristine files online there. However, I realize Zenfolio could have issues at some point. So, for the past couple of years I also have been adding my exported JPGs to the Adobe and Apple clouds. In a nutshell, I export my JPGs at full size with a quality level of 90 and have them on my Synology at home and online with Zenfolio, Adobe and Apple. Hope this helps someone.

I watch your photo videos and I sometimes forget what a computer guy you are. I'm glad you mentioned BTRFS. It's a good filesystem that can detect bitrot. Also a good one is ZFS -- which is what I use. There are tons of videos around the Internet on setting up home NAS boxes using things like FreeNAS or Proxmox. I would advise anyone interested in this to take a look at those.

For some reason, right from the very beginning I took having a backup routine very seriously, probably to the point of overdoing it, if that's possible. Then again I only have about 15 TB currently. I started with CDs when they were the most affordable solution, then external drives, DVD's, BluRay and cloud services. All of my data is backed up multiple hard drives (on and off site), optical media and the cloud. I haven't lost a file, to my knowledge, in almost 30 years. Hard drives DO fail and optical media does go bad but so having multiple backups is critical. That being said, in all that time, I've only had one or two occasions where I found the back up to be corrupted. Even my oldest optical back ups, while I wouldn't rely on them still seem to be in good shape.

Use your pictures! That’s the best way to keep our valuable memories! Printed copy is one of the best way to keep some valuable memories! Sometimes the old methods helps!

Tony, you have an amazing IT background so you probably know how to set up a RAID storage solution... LOL! I am watching this in real time so I see that you DID suggest a RAID solution... curious to see how you set it up...

Thanks for the video Tony! But I think you did not tell us how someone can prevent corrupted stuff from being backed up and also corrupting the backups.

I'm keeping the pictures backed up automatically on a QNAP NAS and separate manual backup one in a while on 2 separate drives attached to NAS (externally) just as another back-up that doesn't overwrite automatically. I lost pictures in the past, professional and personal, an entire year of photos.

I once lost a chunk of photos, and I worry about this. Currently, I keep all my RAW photos on an external drive, and have a copy on a 2nd external drive. Also, I have JPEGs of all my photos on Smugmug. It is hard to have a perfect solution, and most people aren't IT professionals who know how to set up a complicated RAID drive with NAS. I think online (cloud) storage is the way to go. In a sense you are then letting an IT company worry about maintaining drives and backups in different locations, and they have the resources to do that. But my solution for myself is based on my being a hobbyist; professionals have different needs.

Don't have a horror story so far (fingers crossed) but big thank you for this video since I have to take this more seriously..!! We all need backups and we just don't think about this till disaster strikes. Some photographers also advocate for the creation of actual negatives and the creation of an archive - safely stored that is. But nothing is safe 100%...

Ten years I had a few problems with pictures suddenly getting massive color stripes. That was enough for me to make multiple backups as a habit. I also made checksums for files so errors could be caught before a file was reviewed by a human. Rule #1: never backup a bad file. Now I use WINRAR on windows. It handles its RAR and other formats such as ZIP. It includes checksums for the files and optionally encryption and error correction encoding.

Video is a bit of a problem to back up because of the space it takes up. For most amateur photographers though, photos can be backed up to a number of different sources for free. You might not be able to store shots at the highest quality, but platforms like Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram have virtually no limit to the number of pictures you can store. As a backup of last resort, these platforms are very valuable. Evan as amateurs we still run several backup drives. We almost got caught a while ago when our work drive failed and when I went to make a new copy from the backup drive, it failed too. Thankfully it was under warranty from Seagate and they flew our drive to their recovery facility in the Netherlands and recovered ALL of the irreplaceable footage on the backup free of charge. It was ALL of the footage we have taken of Western Australia over decades and would have been soul destroying to lose. A couple of things I would add are, 1. NEVER try to recover damaged drives or files yourself. You will almost certainly do more damage and make otherwise recoverable data completely unrecoverable. 2. Backup irreplaceable files at least TWICE. One backup is never enough. Keep one backup off site. I carry one drive where ever I go, so if there was a catastrophe at home, I still have a copy of all the important files with me. KZfaq is another free option for storing video footage. You can upload to your account and keep the files private or if you just want to share them with friends you can make them unlisted and just give the links to people you want to share them with. Paying to back stuff up is essential if you are a professional but for most others, there are many free services available that you can use to keep copies of your files. Oh and one more REALLY important thing to remember, Don't just back your files up and then put them in storage for months, or years at a time. Drives maintain themselves best when they are powered up and just left to run for a few hours. The data gets refreshed by the OS and there is less chance of corruption. If you just unplug a drive and store it for a very long time, chances are that the data on it will be corrupt the next time you power it up.

Synology NAS and their C2 Cloud Backup works great. Good warning about cloud storage. In most cases they will sync corrupted files and overwrite the good versions. You need cloud backup with historical version retention.

For most people, I would just check your onsite backup before syncing to the cloud, and then for files that don't change, don keep resyncing them, as this can lead to problems if your onsite backup (that is used as source to sync with your cloud backup) becomes corrupt, then you're syncing corrupt data. What I do is verify my files both onsite and then after they are in the cloud (using verification tools) and then once that's done, I disconnect the backup (no need to continue backing up files that don't change, which is usually my RAW files). Then I do backup my catalogs and edit data (and any files I create with PS or LR) and sync those. At least my RAWs are untouched as I don't sync them, but rather just do a one-way backup once, and then I'm done (so more like archiving your RAW files in the cloud, not syncing them, which is two way on most systems). In fact as I'm writing this, I'm doing a second cloud storage backup of my files on another cloud storage platform just to be safe.

Under Windows I use the system tool RoboCopy to copy my images from one hard drive to a different one. That does not copy unchanged files, so it does not "copy corruption". Corrupted files usually have same size and time stamp so they are not detected as new.

I had this happen to a lot of my family vacation photos in Lightroom. All my stuff gets backed up to AWS S3 now but I'm an AWS architect so I can craft a pretty cost effective solution that is probably a lot more complex than what most people can manage.

I've had a memory card fail once, and it was on my first wedding. So glad I was shooting to two cards.

Definitely one of the photographer's worst nightmares. I started shooting in digital in 2001 and fully moved to the format from film by 2006 so I have a lot of backed up photos as well. I used to backup to DVD-ROM until I found out a while back that the discs that were supposed to last a lifetime were actually rotting away. Fortunately, by the time I realized this, I was able to safely copy everything to external HDDs. Nowadays I back up to external HDD, which I keep disconnected when not in use, and online.

Customer files get backed up on two external drives. I try not to reuse the SD cards aside until the project is over. Deliverables get stored in OneDrive. BackBlaze also runs continually to keep everything backed up another layer, with the 1-year history add-on in case you need to roll-back to a previous version. Haven't had an SD card go bad since I switched to the Sandisk Extreme Pro cards. They're (much) more expensive, but haven't had any failures in the last 10 years. During my university days in the early 2000s I had a HDD go bad on me where I lost a few weeks worth of files, but otherwise fortunate to have all my files since the early 1990s.