Dual Card Slots: A Photographer’s Safeguard
When it comes to professional event photography, particularly for weddings, the importance of using cameras with dual card slots cannot be overstated. This feature has become a non-negotiable for me when selecting equipment for capturing those priceless, once-in-a-lifetime moments.
The photography community is sharply divided on this issue, with one camp believing dual card slots are completely unnecessary, often citing the fact that film cameras of the past managed just fine without such backup. I was even shocked to learn that some photographers shoot with dual card slot cameras but don’t even bother utilizing the second slot! On the other hand, the opposing side, which I firmly belong to, considers the lack of dual card slots in a camera to be an absolute deal-breaker for professional work, as any readily available technological advantage that helps prevent image loss should be employed.
Just as I always wear my seatbelt and appreciate the multiple airbags in modern vehicles, even though I’ve never been in a serious car crash, I believe the benefits dual card slot camera bodies provide to photographers capturing priceless and unrepeatable events are far too valuable to disregard. I did once, many years ago, experience a CompactFlash card in my Nikon D3s malfunctioning and corrupting the directory structure. However, I was able to easily pull the files from the secondary card, avoiding any catastrophic data loss. While recovery software or a professional data recovery service may have been able to salvage most or all of the images from the malfunctioning card, I’m certainly grateful I didn’t need to rely on that option.
But card malfunctions are just one potential source of image loss. An even more common culprit is simple human error or other human-caused circumstances. Probably the most heartbreaking (and cringeworthy) story I’ve heard involves a photographer who set their card wallet on the top of their car while packing up at the end of a wedding, then drove away without realizing it. The wallet fell off onto the pavement, and by the time the photographer retraced their steps the next morning, the cards had been run over multiple times and were physically destroyed beyond any hope of recovery. Another example is when a photographer leaves their gear bag in the car, only to have it stolen, resulting in the irreplaceable wedding photographs being lost forever.
While memory cards should always be treated with the utmost care and not left unattended or handled in a way that could lead to misplacement, we are all human and capable of making mistakes. Shooting to dual cards offers significant protection in these types of scenarios.
Proper Memory Card Handling Practices
Consider the process of what to do with your used memory cards at the end of a wedding day. Most photographers utilize some form of case or wallet for safely and securely storing and transporting their cards, but the simple act of removing them from the camera increases the chances of them being misplaced. After all, it’s much harder to lose a card when it’s still firmly inside the camera, surrounded by the rest of the gear. However, there’s also the possibility that you and your camera could become separated, such as if you’re robbed while walking back to your car or your vehicle is burglarized during a stop on the way home. In those scenarios, having the cards on your person would be the safer option.
The perfect solution is to do both – immediately separate the cards when you’re done shooting, with one set going into your secure card wallet (which should be kept in your front pocket and tethered to a belt loop) while the other set remains in the cameras. This dual approach, enabled by the convenience of dual card slots, provides an effective safeguard against both human error and misfortune.
As a real-world example, in 2019 a Texas photographer shooting a destination wedding in Colorado somehow misplaced the memory card case containing all the photographs from the event. Apparently, she was using single card slot cameras (or had a dual card slot camera but was only shooting to single cards, as some photographers inexplicably do). By the time she realized the cards were missing, she was already at the airport, ready to board her flight home. The search area was massive, spanning the various locations visited throughout the day, and the hotel staff insisted the card case was not left in the room. Although the story went viral and prompted numerous volunteers to scour the areas she had been, the cards were never recovered.
Had this event been captured to dual memory cards, with one set remaining in the cameras and the other securely on her person, it’s highly unlikely that both sets would have been lost simultaneously. Additionally, most destination wedding photographers I know also bring a laptop and backup hard drive to make extra copies of the images before leaving the location, further insulating against data loss.
Labeling Your Memory Cards
Another important practice is to label all of your memory cards with your name and contact information. I used to write this directly on the cards with a Sharpie, but that would often wear off over time from repeated handling. These days, I use small laminated labels printed from a DYMO label maker, which have remained perfectly legible for years.
Just be sure to keep an eye on how well the labels stay adhered to the cards, as a peeling label could potentially come off and get stuck inside the camera’s card slot.
Developing Reliable Download Habits
Make it an unbreakable habit to download the images from your memory cards as soon as you get home from a shoot. I’ve heard far too many stories of photographers leaving their cards on the desk or even just in the cameras, intending to download them later in the week, only to then inadvertently erase and reuse those cards a few days later when rushing out the door for another session, having completely forgotten about the previous job’s images.
Putting off the download process, even for just a day or two, drastically increases the chances of a mishap like this occurring. It’s also important to note that the longer you delay downloading your cards, the longer you go with insufficient backups, especially the crucial off-site backup. What would happen if your home or studio were to suffer a catastrophic event like a fire or burglary?
Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be a painful or inconvenient process. Simply make the computer your first stop when you get home. If you have multiple card readers, you can set up all your cards to download simultaneously while you go take a shower, grab a snack, and get ready for bed. By the time you return, the process will be complete, and you can then move on to backing up your files.
Backing Up Your Images and Lightroom Catalog
Admittedly, I may go a bit overboard with my backup practices, but considering how priceless these wedding and portrait images are to our clients, I firmly believe it’s better to err on the side of caution. Hard drives are relatively inexpensive these days, and I want to do everything possible to avoid ever having to deliver the devastating news that a client’s photographs have been lost.
As a Mac user, I rely on Carbon Copy Cloner to handle my backups. This app does an excellent job of performing incremental backups, meaning only new or modified files need to be copied. It’s also very fast at determining what needs to be backed up.
My backup workflow includes:
- Automatic nightly backups of my various drives to a large 14TB external hard drive
- Automatic hourly backups of my computer’s internal SSD and my main 2TB external SSD working drive to secondary SSDs, enabling a quick shift to a secondary computer if needed
- Manually-triggered backups for drives I keep disconnected when not in use
The full backups of my internal SSD that Carbon Copy Cloner creates are compatible with Apple’s Migration Assistant, allowing for a quick and painless restore to a new computer if necessary.
If your backup method consists of a single external hard drive that stays connected to your computer at all times, you essentially have no backup at all. A good example is a photographer who posted a few years ago in a Facebook group, asking for help recovering files from a damaged hard drive. Her only backup was a portable drive that was usually kept connected to her laptop – when the computer got knocked to the floor, both the main drive and the backup were damaged.
At a bare minimum, you need at least two local backups, plus an additional off-site backup. I utilize a variety of drives for this purpose:
- 14TB external hard drives (two – one connected constantly for nightly backups, one kept disconnected for monthly manual backups)
- 4TB portable SSD for weekly backups of my main working drive and laptop
- 5TB portable hard drive for a secondary backup of final JPEG images
- BackBlaze cloud backup for a secure, geographically-distant off-site backup of my most important files
I also have several separate drives dedicated specifically to backing up my wedding and portrait RAW files, as well as my Lightroom catalog:
- External 3TB networked drive (kept disconnected except when running backups)
- Portable 1TB SSDs (two, kept physically separated and alternated for backups)
- 512GB USB flash drive for immediate post-shoot backup before cloud sync
Everyone has their own comfort level, but I believe it’s prudent to be extra cautious when it comes to these priceless client images. While two local backups plus a cloud backup may be sufficient for some, I prefer the added redundancy of my multi-drive system.
Lightroom Catalog Backups
One important consideration for Lightroom Classic users is that BackBlaze, like some other cloud backup services, has a limitation on how often large files (over 100MB) are backed up. Specifically, if you have a large file (such as your Lightroom catalog) that was backed up on a Monday, any revisions you make to that file over the next day or two will not be backed up until the following Wednesday, when the two-day interval has elapsed.
While this scenario is highly unlikely to impact me, since I maintain multiple local backups of my Lightroom catalog, it’s still a good idea to have an additional safeguard in place. Fortunately, Lightroom Classic has an option to automatically prompt you to locally back up the catalog file upon quitting the application, with various intervals (monthly, weekly, daily, or even every time) to choose from. I have mine set to back up the catalog every time I exit Lightroom.
These local backups are quick and easy, as Lightroom compresses the catalog file down to around 150-200MB before saving it. And since each backup is a new file, the two-day cloud backup limitation does not apply. Just be sure to periodically clean out the backup folder to prevent it from building up indefinitely.
RAID is Not a Backup
I often cringe when I hear someone say, “I store my files on a RAID system/DROBO, so I don’t need to worry about backups.” A RAID is a group of drives configured to work together, and while this can provide benefits like increased performance or redundancy, it is not a substitute for a proper backup strategy.
One type of RAID configuration is optimized for maximum speed, with data striped across multiple drives. While this is attractive for high-end video editing, if any of those individual drives fail, the entire array is lost. Most users understand this and have appropriate backup solutions in place.
The more problematic scenario is when photographers set up a RAID with some form of inherent redundancy, where the array can withstand the failure of one or more drives without losing data. This can sometimes be misinterpreted as negating the need for a separate backup. This is a dangerous misconception, as a RAID offers no protection against file corruption or accidental deletion. Additionally, a catastrophic event like a lightning strike or power surge could still take out the entire RAID simultaneously.
So, if a RAID isn’t a backup, why would someone bother with it? Depending on the configuration, a RAID can be useful for those who absolutely require the best possible performance (with a striped setup) or for enterprises that cannot afford even a few hours of downtime from a failed drive. But for most photographers, I believe the potential cons outweigh the benefits.
My perspective on this is partly shaped by a previous experience with a NAS (network-attached storage) RAID system. When the power supply failed, it not only corrupted the data on all the drives but also made the entire array unrecoverable, forcing me to reformat it. Of course, I had backups, but it was a time-consuming hassle to get the NAS back up and running.
Additionally, the availability of massive individual hard drives (up to 18TB) has diminished the need for some users to combine multiple smaller drives into a RAID for a larger total storage capacity.
Verifying Your Backups
One final, crucial point: you should periodically verify that your backups are functioning as expected, rather than simply assuming they are working. There have been several high-profile incidents where backup systems failed without the owners’ knowledge, leading to devastating data loss.
For example, a few years ago, a courthouse server in New Orleans crashed, resulting in the loss of decades’ worth of real estate transactions and documents. When the IT staff attempted to recover the data from the backup system, they discovered it had actually ceased functioning properly about a year earlier, containing very little useful information. Similarly, during the production of Pixar’s Toy Story 2, an animator accidentally deleted a significant portion of the 3D modeling assets, only to find that the backup system had quietly failed at some point in the past.
The lesson here is clear: in addition to verifying that your backups are working, it’s essential to maintain multiple backup methods and devices as an extra safeguard. Relying on a single backup, even if it’s an external hard drive, leaves you vulnerable to unforeseen circumstances. By implementing a robust, redundant backup strategy, you can have the peace of mind that your precious wedding and portrait images are protected, no matter what challenges may arise.
