Backups: Before You Lose Everything
Backups: Before You Lose Everything
The practical rule is three copies on two different media, with one of them outside your home. A copy on a single drive next to your computer isn't a backup — it's a second copy, because theft, fire, or spilled water takes both at once. Start by protecting what can't be replaced: unpublished footage and projects in progress.
What actually gets lost
Hard drives usually fail without warning, cards corrupt, and computers get stolen and have drinks spilled on them.
The real loss isn't the hardware — it's what can't be reshot:
- Footage of an event that has passed and won't repeat
- An interview with someone hard to reach
- A trip that cost you a week and money
Anything you can re-download or redo costs you time rather than being a disaster. Telling the two apart decides what you protect first.
The three-copy rule
The well-known rule in this field is simple:
- Three copies of anything important
- On two different media — a drive and cloud storage, say, not two drives of the same model bought together
- And one copy off-site, away from where you work
The third point is where everyone slips. Two drives in the same room are effectively one copy, because whatever happens to one happens to the other.
Where to start in practice
Don't try to protect everything at once. Start in order:
| Priority | What | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Unpublished raw footage | Cannot be replaced at all |
| 2 | Projects in progress | Redoing them means redoing all the work |
| 3 | Final exports | Useful, but re-exportable |
| 4 | Old published archive | Exists on the platform at lower quality |
Unpublished raw footage is what you should copy the same night you shoot it, before you sleep.
Three overlooked things
An untested backup isn't a backup. Try restoring a file from it every few months. Plenty of backups are discovered to be corrupt on the day they're needed.
Syncing isn't backing up. Services that sync a folder propagate deletions too — delete a file by mistake and it disappears from both sides. A backup keeps previous versions; a sync doesn't.
A memory card isn't storage. Empty it after every shoot. Keeping a month of material on one card is a bet on a small object that's easy to lose.
A simple system that suits most people
The same night you shoot:
- Copy the card to your working drive
- Copy it to a second, separate drive
- Check the files actually open before erasing the card
Weekly: upload projects in progress to cloud storage.
Monthly: take the second drive somewhere else — a relative's house, your office — and swap it back next month.
The third step in that list is the most important, and the one most often skipped when tired. Erasing a card before confirming the copy is a routine cause of losing an entire day.
What you don't need
You don't need a complex system to begin. Two external drives and a cloud storage account will serve you for years.
And you don't need to put everything in the cloud — raw footage is large and expensive to store. Upload projects and exports, and keep raw material on drives.
The short version
Three copies, two media, one off-site.
Start tonight with unpublished footage. Everyone who has lost a project knew they should back up, and hadn't got round to it.