Recommended Setup - Photography Backup System

This is our first entry in our recommended setups section. We always strive to find the best operational setup for the best price for our customers. The recommendation below is what we have found to be the most cost effective setup for the best performance and reliability out there today. There are a dozen different ways to go about doing something of this nature and we test several if not all of them and find the best one.

How do WE determine it is the best?

It has to be easy for an end user to setup and maintain
It has to be cost effective, the best solutions for the right money. Not necessarily the cheapest
It has to follow our guidelines for reliability and efficiency. We are not going to provide a recommendation that involved a 12+ steps for every time you use said recommendation, simplicity is key
It makes effective use of your technology you probably already have
As to point two, acquiring any new technology you won’t be spending “and arm and a leg” to get it

*DISCLAIMER* As with all advice and recommendations. This is our opinion and recommendation please do not take this as certified professional advice as is and reach out to us to help you ensure that the advice we list below is actually in fact the best possible solution to a problem you are facing

Our setup:

We wanted to keep this simple. How does the professional photographer keep their files protected and backed up? There are dozens of ways to do this but we needed to find the median between redundancy and performance when using programs such as Lightroom and Photoshop to edit and master your photographs.

This is our recommendation:

The Setup

Windows based PC (we are not going to get into specifications, we are only talking about backup and redundancy) This can also be an Apple based computer for this setup
1 at least 500GB USB 3.0 device
1 at least 1TB (2TB+ recommended) USB 3.0 device
Backblaze backup software

This is what we did with it

The computer we have this setup on has a dedicated Operating system and program drive and a separate drive JUST for photoshop actions and abilities (again this is another post to why we did this) This particular computer had no more space for additional internal drives as they would have worked just as well (and would have been slightly less expensive) to implement.

The 500GB+ USB 3.0 Drive is the Photographers active clients. We placed the drive on a separate USB 3.0 system for maximum performance, at USB 3.0 speeds, the drive keeps up with Lightroom imports as well as any Photoshop saving and loading without skipping a beat.

The second 1+ TB USB3.0 drive is the Photographers archive. As jobs are completed/ the active drive becomes full, client folders and pictures are moved to this second drive.

Backblaze is an affordable cloud solution offering unlimited backup for your computer and any external drives. It is well worth the money to have peace of mind knowing that your data is somewhere safe offsite in case your onsite data is damaged/ stolen/ destroyed.

Where to buy

Canada Computers 2.5″ SATA HDD – 500GB Starts at $60+

Canada Computers 2.5″ USB 3.0 SATA Enclosure – $10-$25

Backblaze Annual backup subscription – $60 USD (Approx.$80 CAD)

Why dont you recommend a complete USB Drive like a WD My Book?

Although the WD My Books are great (and cheap!) this setup has a much higher life expectancy and OEM drives (the hard drive above) are designed to perform not designed to be mass manufactured like premade USB Hard Drives. From a price perspective they are going to be about the same, if it works for you then go for those instead!

Not a fan of Backblaze? Its ok, there are TONS of services out there for backup. Backblaze is our recommended software

Contact Us for more Info

Want some professional advice for your setup for your business? Need this or another setup tweaked or improved for max performance? Get a hold of us below!