Do you Backup as you shoot?

I do, at least I am able to do when I’m shooting tethered with my CameraControl 4.1 script. Every image goes onto the flash memory card in the camera *and* onto the hard disk of the attached PC.

That matters to me when I’m doing a critical shoot. To me a critical shoot means one of my wife or my kids, capturing moments near to my heart which may never be exactly replicated. Particularly true with a 4 month old baby! It’s amazing how every week he is do different – so no going back and saying “I’ll take that picture again next week”, coz it won’t be the same will it?

Not that I have ever had a memory card fail in any of my DSLRs (D40 or D300), but I have had them fail either technically or due to operator error and lost shots I’m sad about. There is only one chance at a “first time” for something particularly with kids.

So if I shoot tethered, with a tiny Fujitsu Lifebook perhaps in a backpack if I’m moving about and a cable into the camera then I’m sure I have two copies of everything.

Of course I could get a D3 instead with two card slots which I believe allows shots to be written to both, but wouldn’t that be overkill?

3 Replies to “Do you Backup as you shoot?”


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    Guy dV says:

    I also think it’s worth using an automatic folder replication utility like Robocopy (from Microsoft Technet, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2006.11.utilityspotlight.aspx or see Wikipedia entry)
    Or Microsoft’s SyncToy, though I think they are gradually replacing it with “Windows Live Sync”.
    Maybe suggest people use this rather than add an enhancements to Camera Control (“Backup downloaded images to second folder location”)


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    raymond says:

    Indeed Guy you have highlighted a key problem here — what to include and what to depend on external tools for. For my own use I’d agree with you and use robocopy or maybe rsync to manage multiple copies on the PC. However for that matter I’ve little interest in expanding the on-screen preview ability of CameraControl because I use Bridge to do this much better; however better on-scren preview is the top most requested enhancement!

    This somewhat contributes to the lack of development of the script; the things most requested are the things of least interest to me, and the things of most interest to me are apparently of little interest to others.

    Put like that it’s a bit like my photography; the things I wish to photograph are of no interest to others (at least nobody around me) and the things they think I should photograph are of on interest to me. Doesn’t encourage much progress I’m afraid.


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    Steve says:

    I always back up to 2 different hard drives after a shoot. Having a copy on both chip and hard drive at the time the pic is taken is great for peace of mind with the tabletop stuff.

    Now if only my camera could save to hard drive remotely….


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