This is a slightly modified excerpt from my book "Lightroom CC Workflow" (download for free here)

One of the most important things for every photographer should be to back everything up, redundantly and safely.

The first and obvious way to do it is to use local hard drives: I have 2 copies of the photos I use for my work in two different hard drives.

I also have copies in Google Photos and the Adobe Creative Cloud (Lightroom CC).

I don't think this is enough though. I usually travel with those two hard drives, so if I lose the bag I'd lose everything. Also, Google Photos keeps a low-res version of my pictures and Lightroom... well, I don't trust Lightroom 100%.

And let's not forget about my video files either. I can't afford to make local copies of those files because they are usually big.

This is why I need a cloud-based backup system. I use Backblaze: it’s simple and it works just fine. It’s $5/month or $60/year, and since you can back up as many files as you want (including those in external hard drives) you’ll get more bang for your buck if you have a lot of data.

I back up everything, not only my images. All the footage for my Landscape Photography YouTube channel is up there. As are a lot of personal files. More than 3TB distributed accross 3 local hard drives. The downside is: it takes a long time to upload all that data.

Note: if you are interested in signing up, you can do it through this link to get one month free (and I’ll get another month for free as well): https://secure.backblaze.com/r/011s3a.

There are plenty of other cloud-based backup services out there (like SOS and iDrive) - if you find one better than Backblaze please let me know!, and of course you can use additional hard drives and keep them in a different physical place.

Whatever you do, keep at least two copies of everything. It took you a lot of effort to create those beautiful images and work, let’s not lose it due to a hard drive failure or a bug in the software.