✦Aisle & After
The Template Drawer · File eight of eight
keeping themPhoto backup checklist
One gallery link is not a backup.
The gallery arrives, you look at all two thousand of them in one sitting, you send the link to your mother, and then nobody opens it again for four years. By then the link has expired, the photographer has changed systems, and the phone that held the guest photographs was replaced in a shop.
This is the week to fix that. It takes an evening.
Gallery arrived on
Download link expires
- Download the full-resolution files. Not the web-sized preview set. If both are offered, take both, and keep them in separate folders.
- Verify the file count and open a random handful. Compare the number of files against what the photographer said they delivered. Open ten at random, from the beginning, middle and end.
- Keep the photographer’s delivery notes. The email that came with the gallery usually contains the retention period, the rights and the file naming. Save it as a PDF into the same folder.
- Copy the whole folder to two separate physical locations. Two drives in one drawer is one location. One at home and one at a parent’s house is two.
- Keep one encrypted cloud copy.
- Preserve filenames and metadata. Do not rename in bulk or re-export through an app that strips dates. The capture times are how the day stays in order.
- Export phone and guest uploads into the same archive. Guest portals, shared albums and group chats. This is the part that disappears first.
- Save voice notes separately. Speeches, ceremony audio, the messages people left. Audio is rarely in the photographer’s delivery and is rarely backed up by anyone.
- Record the usage rights you have. What you may print, share and give to family, in one line, written where the files are.
- Schedule an annual drive check. A calendar reminder on your anniversary. Plug both drives in, open something, confirm they still work.
- Tell one other person where the archive lives. A backup nobody else can find is a backup that survives everything except a bad year.
| Copy | Where it is | Last checked | Who else knows |
|---|---|---|---|
| Original download | |||
| Physical copy one | |||
| Physical copy two | |||
| Encrypted cloud copy | |||
| Guest uploads & audio |
Three copies, two kinds of storage, one somewhere else. It is the oldest rule in archiving and it survives house moves, dead laptops, expired links and companies that quietly close. You do not need a system. You need three copies and a note on the anniversary.