I made the decision last year to really beef up my image file backup and storage setup. After meeting the folks at G-Technology last year in Las Vegas at WPPI, the Wedding and Portrait Photographers International show, I fell in love with their products. After doing a lot of research and speaking with tons of other photogs, I decided to invest in extremely well made and reliable G-Technology product line. Both JD and I invested in dual 12TB G-Tech Studio Thunderbolt Storage Systems, which allows for automation, taking as much human error out of the equation that we can.

[Jay’s Interview with G-Technology at WPPI]

The advantage to using the G-Tech drives is the automation of backing up all our files, using RAID1, from one internal drive to the other. We each added the 2nd Studio to completely mirror the 1st, backing it up in case something catastrophic was to happen (knock on wood) and the entire 1st Studio fails. This makes a total of two G-tech Studios mirroring each other, each with two drives, making a total of 4 identical drives. Surprisingly, with 4 separate drives, we are only left with a total of 6TB of usable storage. Plenty, for the way we use them.

The dual G-Technology Studio drives hold a single year of Twisted Oaks Studio wedding images. At the beginning of 2016, we moved all of the 2015 weddings onto smaller and cheaper drives that are kept safely in a fireproof safe offsite. We also keep the current weddings backed up this way, keeping a full copy of the Studio drives on a 4TB Western Digital drive which gets locked in the same fireproof safe. Each time we shoot a wedding, we add the images to the Studio drives as well as the smaller WD drives. Once each wedding is edited and the images are delivered to our clients, we add a 3rd level of protection, online protection. We use Cloudspot to host our client’s image galleries, where they will stay forever.

We also use some of the G-Tech mobile external drives which allow us to backup files in the fly or during the wedding day. The ev ATC mobile drive is my favorite mobile drive I’ve ever used, and it usually goes everywhere with me.