![Win 1 of 3 My Cloud Mirror 2 Hard Drives With A Single Comment - $300 Value [UPDATED]](https://cdn.fstoppers.com/styles/large-16-9/s3/lead/2016/04/wd_hard_drive_for_photographers_0_jpg.webp)
The winners of the contest have been chosen. Congratulations to:
Joshua Jeppesen
Hector Reyes
Ian Johns
We will be in touch with you via your Fstoppers messaging system to receive your prize! Thank you to everyone who participated.
One of the most important aspects of our work as photographers is the storage of our photos and videos. Not only do our businesses regularly depend on our images and videos remaining safe until final delivery, many of us keep years of personal memories backed up for safe keeping. A few weeks ago, our own Alex Cooke wrote a review on one of the most dependable ways to back up what's important to you, the new My Cloud Mirror 2. As a follow up to his article, Fstoppers and WD would like make sure you have the option to keep your back ups secure by giving away three My Cloud Mirror 2 units. Check out the details below.
When it comes to backing up files, all of us place importance on different things. I personally have hundreds of thousands of wedding images I've taken for clients over the years stored on multiple hard drives. The story of these images show my progress as a photographer, and also guarantee that in a dire situation, my clients can retain access to their pictures. Outside of my business, I place the most value on the many travel pictures I've taken in over a dozen countries with my wife. These are some of my most treasured moments and memories in my life. I love to look back on them from time to time to remember the many rich life experiences we've shared together.
What are the most important items you store digitally? Fstoppers and WD would like to hear from you and give you the chance to safely store the precious aspects of your lives with a new 4TB My Cloud Mirror (Gen 2).
To be eligible to receive one of the three giveaway units, simply leave a comment below this article describing the most important items you back up. Fstoppers will randomly select three winners from the comments to receive a 4TB My Cloud Mirror (Gen 2). For a full list of sweepstakes rules and eligibility, click HERE.
I am an events photographer and I need a reliable system set in plce to back up the original raw and jpeg reference files for storage. Currently i dont have a great system in place and need the 4TB My Cloud Mirror (Gen 2) to help with this issue.
The older I get, the more I realize the importance of backups. I have word documents from the early 90's, photos, videos, spreadsheets, and client backups. It all needs a safe, dependable place to live.
All hard drive have the potential to fail. Yes in the past I have had this happen to me. Thankfully the most important photos were backed up on a second drive. Looking now to upgrade my back-up system, and yes WD is one that I am looking at.
Weddings, Weddings, Weddings! Did i mention backing up weddings. The more backups the better:) I never want to be an article on Fstoppers or anywhere for that matter for not backing up my work:)
10 years of digital photos, home videos, and a ton of music.
I would back up my entire photo library. Raw files and finished jpegs.
My large music collection also needs a backup copy.
Like many here, family first and travels second... but actually don't want to lose either. Apart from dual backup drives (one in house rotated with one stored offsite) I practice backing up all of my photos (jpg exports, not raw) on DVR annually and give copy to each of my kids. Saves giving them a shoebox when I'm gone. :-)
All media we produce is important to us for one reason or another. Whether it be family or clients, back up everything!
This kinda hits hard...I just lost a whole bunch of personal photos due to the absolute worst hard drive failure I've ever experienced. I've had hard drives fail before, but this one was fine at 11 PM when I went to bed and wouldn't boot at 7 AM when I got up again. Windows can't explore the drive - can't even tell how big it is. Recovery programs fail to access the drive. It went down hard. Fortunately, I do have multiple backups over the years that allowed me to recover most things...but I lost about 6 months worth of photos...
What I'll miss the most will be the photos I took in Colorado with my significant other, the classic Hollywood photoshoot we did (though fortunately the best from this shoot were on film), and the many day-trips we took together to unique places - covered bridges, historic districts in small towns, hiking trails...
Other items of extreme importance to me that, fortunately, are backed up elsewhere are my publications and my dissertation (anyone who has written a dissertation knows that you back that thing up everywhere you can get access...external hard drives, cloud storage, other people's computers, DVDs, flash drives, printed copies, stone etchings, etc, etc, etc). I have also built a rather extensive music collection over the years that would kill me to lose. Again, fortunately most of that was backed up to an external and the rest available in the cloud.
So uh...yeah, another horror story to emphasize the importance of a drive like this! You're welcome!
The most important thing I backup is my photo - They're memories, not just files on a drive. And that's important to me!
I shoot photos and DP on some Indie film projects. Often, I am responsible for keeping the data safe.
#1 backup is photos. #2 are financial, but those can generally be re-downloaded in an emergency.
photos are irreplacable
My Family pictures are very important because I need to keep it all movements that we can't go back and I can give them to my next generation to see our family activities, laughing, loving, playing each others so we need one place where I can trust to keep those good memory pictures from time to time, generation to generation without lost any moments.
I back up everything! I dream it, I create it and I back it up.
The most important items I store digitally are my family photos and my Prince albums. Prince has next to nothing on Spotify!
Interesting. Prince died the same day you posted that. Was this coincidence, or did you know by the time you commented? (It doesn't show the time that people post.)
The last pictures of my father before he passed, I cherish them even though the quality is not enough to allow high resolution prints.
In order of importance, family pictures, professionnal projects, personnal projects. Because after all...family
The absolute most important digital records for me to backup are photos and videos of my family, especially of my children. These are priceless to me, and preserving these memories is very important. My parents have a bunch of old film prints of me and my siblings as infants/toddlers, but not many after those very early years. I'd like for my kids to have a digital archive of memories of themselves and of their family throughout the years.
Im always working in cultural projects. And always ran out of space in my computer. I always need to back up even a single picture, no matter if it is overexposure or blurry. I always can find a way to make it better.
Pictures of my trips to Iceland, my niece, and of my friends. These are the most precious to me, and I'd love to have a wireless backup solution.
I'm a photographer since I was 9, i'm 45 now (feeling like a baby) to me my client photos are important, but not only those of our clients. Family photos are important to strengthening any bond when we find ourselves alone. To have a photo of your child or spouse when they are far away or have passed into another plane is a way to strengthen the soul. The strength that a photo can bring to morale is unparalleled. Moreover a photo shows a time in history made with a specific medium chosen at the time based on the technological advances of that era. Having a Cloud Mirror 2 Hard Drive will ensure our memories will be safe for ages to be enjoyed, re visit history, remember our loved ones, and to strengthen our morale, values and spirit! I see the Cloud Mirror 2 Hard Drive more as a safe lock to relive and remember moments in history that brought joy to us when in the distant future we will find ourselves alone! I put my faith on that!!!!!
I would definitely back up all my clients' photos, everything from weddings to author interviews.
My wife and I have spent countless hours scanning and archiving boxes of old photographs from both of our families dating back 3 generations. We have a 2 year old and a 4 month old, and have thousands of photographs and videos documenting both of their lives since birth.
Photos are the more important. 2nd documents and 3rd my music
Growing up, my family did not keep photo albums nor did they take many photographs. Therefore, I would back up all of the existing photographs from that era that I somehow obtained and scanned in so that I may share them someday with my own family. In addition, I would back up every single photograph and/or video that I have taken since discovering my passion for photography over 10 years ago.
While work photos take up the bulk of my back ups...like many mentioned, photos of my loved ones and travel photos are of most value to me. Thanks for the opportunity!
Like many here, it's definitely my photography. Between growing file sizes and more photos, storage is always a consideration.
I backup all the RAW and subset of processed pictures. I also have a collection of scanned pictures from pre-digital that i backup. Will be looking to add some conversions of 35mm slides next.
My family's life...It is all backed up digitally
As a wedding photographer. It's a one shot deal. We can potentially lose the edits and it's not as a big deal. A couple of hours of editing and we're back. But losing RAW files would be catastrophic. We've also added video this past year so the storage capacity needs for our studio has increased drastically. So for us, having a simple, reliable, and fast solution is vital to staying in business. We currently have 2 out of 3. Having a better input/output speed would help cut down the time for digesting the influx of new photos & videos and catalogs and on the backend accessing and exporting final edits. In addition having that accessibility of cloud access with the WD My Cloud would be incredible as I'm often in multiple state for different weddings and projects.
I like whole system image backups, especially with a multi-user computer. Something happens, wipe and renew.
Photos of my family - be it of my wife, dogs, or my kids. In RAW format, plus the edited versions, ready to be uploaded, printed, or shared.
"There is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer"
I liked WD My Cloud network-attached storage device when I bought one last year, but relying on a single-drive NAS can be risky. If that drive fails, and you don’t have a backup, you will lose all your data forever. I am looking to buy the WD My Cloud Mirror because I read an article from Fstoppers, this solves the problem by putting a second drive in the same enclosure, and configuring the drives as RAID 1. All the same data is written to both drives, so that if one drive fails, you can recover everything from the other.
My portfolio is most important. Work I did as a kid, as a student, as an educator. Right now I'm hoping to get one of my external Harddrives to work long enough to pull some college work off of it for an potential opportunity.
Obviously client photos (weddings/Family Portraits/Newspaper assignments), but most important to ME are my 3 daughters pictures. My memories from watching these 3 princesses grow are something I could never afford to lose.
I do sports action photo and videos and dem files are LAAAARGE!
The most important thing, among all my pictures, are my live music photographs. I'm a freelance concert photographer and it is really important to me to save and back up all the photos from the 2-3 concerts that I photograph every week. I could really use one of these!
I would use the My Cloud Mirror 2 to store all of my family photographs in one place.
The most important thing to back up is my client work. It is how I keep paying the bills.
Most people back up memories - I find I back up emotions, how I felt at a point in time that was worth capturing.
All of my creative work - my photos, music, synth backups etc - are 100% digital. Losing them would be devastating!
I would like to backup the photographs I have taken so my family could witness how I saw the world when I'm gone.
I will backup all my RAW files as well as my Lightroom catalog. I do some graphic design work so all those files will be there as well. I'm planning to get a laptop so that will be perfect, I could just the the smart preview on my laptop and everything on My Cloud Mirror when I'm at home.
The most important items I store digitally are my PROCESSED photographs and paintings, i.e., my digital files after all the work has been done on them in Photoshop, DxO Optics Pro, Painter or whatever. I store them in all their finished sizes from 16x24 down to greeting-card size, all with final sharpening. I store various versions of Painter images that I have saved as I went along, because I can revert to those and make a new interpretation, sometimes years after I thought it was "done." There are three copies of each of these on different drives.
Photo's, video's; whether professional or personal
Previously the most important items I backed up were my landscape and travel photographs. However, now that I am a new father, the most important thing now is the pictures of my newborn son, my family, and the countless pictures I have not yet taken that will document his journey to adulthood. Having one of these backup drives would definitely give me a little bit more peace of mind.
My most important items to back up are my lightroom catalog and a crap load of video projects!
Old family photos are the most important for me. Moments from a time that you can never get back with the ones you love the most.
I've lost a lot of physical work from my film days as well as old home photos and videos due to a house fire about 15 years ago, if it wasn't for my digitizing and backing up my data I'd be left with nothing but fading memories! I'm glad I've still got a chance to give a real world look into our families past to our families future :)
I went digital in 1999. Have moved through several cameras to my current D-810. I have taken photos of everything from babies to after burning jet fighters. The My Cloud Mirror (Gen 2) would fit nicely into my image backup strategy.