Redundancy Of Your Images – It’s more than just 2 cards slots.

When we talk about redundancy with our cameras, the term can be very misleading as many people equate redundancy to having the two card slots in your camera, when, in-fact, it is so much more than that. Let’s delve a little deeper…

The idea of redundancy:
Redundancy is a term we use in photography describing how we protect our hard work from being lost. There are many reasons that can contribute in losing your images or video, and we will look at how we can prevent the loss, and what kind of situations can cause loss. This is by far not a comprehensive list, and there may be other factors involved in loss of your data.

How can you lose your images or video?
These are some of the situations in which you can lose your work. People worry about a card being corrupt, but as we will discover, this is just one way to lose your work.

• Card corruption – Your storage card becomes corrupt and unreadable.

• Card loss – Changing cards in events can easily lead to you losing a card, especially in dark or busy environments.

• Camera loss/stolen – A big contributor to loss of images and video is the loss of your equipment!

• Failure to back up images on your computer to more than a couple of backup options – You may think you’re safe after the event, but failure to back up your images instantly can result in lost images if your hard drive(s)/network fail.

Being sensible and planning to avoid redundancy issues.
Believe it or not, having just one card slot isn’t always the issue, although it is a big contributor to losing your work. There are ways that professionals use to combat this, as well as ways to tackle other forms of loss of data.

• If you HAVE to work with one camera that only has one card slot in a special event, have a safety box with a couple of storage cards. During set intervals (or a lull in activity), swap out the card for a fresh card to start the next part of the event. It will minimise loss should a card be corrupted.

• Use a second camera – This is a hugely tried and tested method (regardless of how many card slots you have). You may be photographing with different focal lengths on each camera, but as a photographer you strive for the best images no matter what the focal length, so losing data from one camera (through any means) will ensure you still have useable images.

• Use a second photographer – for the same reasons as above, but you’ll cover more ground and have more variety of images.

• Ensure the camera never leaves your body, do not leave it anywhere unless you have a reliable person with you to take care of it. It only takes a second for someone to pick up your camera without you knowing and it’s gone forever.

• As soon as you can, take the photos off your cards and make sure you send the images to at least two backup locations (plus your computer if you keep photos on that for initial edits). As well as uploading them to a cloud service. You can never have too many backups of a special event

• Keep the images on your cards until you really have to format the cards. One day you’ll thank me for this!

Most importantly, make it routine.
All that is said and done, accidents do happen, card failure does happen (no matter how much you paid, or what kind of card it is) and as humans we can make mistakes (especially if you’re tired after a long day’s shoot).

Make it routine to just follow the simple steps above, and be prepared. It doesn’t matter what camera you are using, or what your computer setup is, there is a point listed that can help you be safe with some kind of redundancy for your images.

I hope this has been helpful, and I know it’s certainly helped me over the years, just because it’s made me feel a bit safer with knowing I’ll have something to bring back from a shoot.

If you have any tips, let us know below!