Don't Lose Your Photos! My Travel Backup & Workflow

Excellent as always! Keep them coming. I love the LR Library course and keep going back to it to refresh my knowledge. I used this backup technique from your course for a 12 day trip to Katmai just this month. It was SO nice to cull photos daily instead of having to wade through thousands of photos upon returning home. Such peace of mind to know there are backups on multiple SSD’s too. It’s literally a game changer for photo road trips! Thanks so much!

Thanks Steve, I just have 1 question. Why don't you just use OneDrive or Google Drive?

This was the exact solution I was searching for and wasn't sure I was going to find! Thanks!

Thank you Steve. I always got myself in a muddle when traveling. Never thought of actually putting the catalogue on the travel hard drive. That will make it a lot easier.

Some good tips there, I will have to consider. But currently I use a Toshiba 2TB spinning drive. I had 1 for a decade now before I was into photography and has never skipped a beat, so through personal experience I trust these to be reliable so I have been using them for my photography, also the are cheap. But speed is definitely a concern for me, I really don't like going through these drives because they are so slow, what's the point of keeping images if you dread having to find them.

Hi Steve. Great video! Does this work if you edit photos on the TS-1 drive using Photoshop in addition to LR before you get back home to import? This happens a-lot for me since my road trips are several weeks at a time.

Thanks for the vid. Worse case scenario, if I have a high number of reject images I normally like to import and cull the rejects directly on the laptop before backing up to external drives otherwise, it saves me having to cull multiple times on each drive ....have I got this right ?

You're an excellent resource for just about all my photographic questions. I hope you have a great 2022. Thanks for all your hard work.

I’m just getting started, and rather than having a bunch of different folders for every outing, I think I’d rather just do one master folder set organized by capture date like Lightroom defaults to on import, then do all my import/trip/whatever organization through collections. My question is though if I just do “copy to” in Lightroom to copy it to my second drive, if I cull through a bunch of photos on my primary drive, won’t they still be there on that second drive and require more cleanup and work on my part? I’m using two T7s to work out of and the second as a backup and want to have them mirror each other so I don’t have a bunch of extra work to do cleaning up the second one. I have my library saved on the first “primary” drive and a folder for backup libraries on the second drive.

Thank you Steve, this was amazing. I just got a new laptop and was trying to figure out the correct workflow.

It would be helpful to add links to the external drives, etc. 😊

What if you don't want to carry a laptop with you?

Hey Steve good video . I’m wondering if you have any suggestions for backing up when you don’t have a laptop handy. Example: out backpacking on a multi day trip it’s not feasible to bring a laptop but cards fill up with photos and video footage and if you fill all of your cards you are done filming for the trip. I saw one from western digital that can accept cards and download the files as a stand alone but western digital hasn’t been the most reliable hard drive manufacturer in recent years so I’m searching for other options.

Thanks for this video , Steve, you're one of my go-to photography teachers. Aside from carrying extra quality SD cards, I was reminded to take an HD drive on my travels. Because you never know, right?

Interesting. I don't have a Win or Mac portable laptop, so I never thought of importing into LR and processing "on the go". Hmm, that would definitely speed up things…

A very straightforward process, thank you. I was getting a little confused by your reference to the T5-1 drive being your primary drive, when it wasn’t. The primary is your big drive at home. T5-1 is one of the on the road back-ups. No matter, I got it.

Great advise.. on the road or at home, you have to back up your images and prepare for things to go sideways. Thanks for presenting this content so clearly and we really enjoy your videos!

Nice video! I do nearly the same for trips. But if you are making a copy of the copy you may be copying corrupt data (if for some reason it didn’t copy over properly). I make each backup from the memory card directly. Also backing up while importing is great thing many people may not be aware of! I’m even more insane and if there is an internet connection, my laptop will upload everything to Backblaze for an additional, off-site backup! 🙌🏻😆

For what it’s worth, huge improvement in the background music.

Thank you sooo much. In one short video, you've made the process of backing up travel photos very clear.

what company do you use to insure your gear?