How to securely store your wedding video

Here’s how to keep your wedding video safe from the gremlins in computers, so you can treasure your memories for years to come

Your wedding video might be a much bigger file than what you’re used to storing.

And it’s also a much more important one to make sure you keep safe. While you can probably cope with your household budget 2019 getting deleted, losing your wedding video to a hard drive failure would be much more devastating.

So here are some good principles to follow to make sure your wedding video is safe for the decades to come.

 

The 3-2-1 backup strategy

This is the best process to follow to keep your video safe for the years to come.

It simply means that you should have three copies of your video on two different storage types, with one copy stored elsewhere in case there’s something like a fire at your home.

So in practice, this might be:

• One copy saved on your main computer
• One copy saved on an external hard drive
• One copy saved on a USB drive which you keep at a friend’s house

You can also add in cloud backup to this – so instead of the copy at your friend’s house, you might instead opt to store your video on dropbox too.

It’s a very worst case scenario approach to storing your video – but you’d be very glad of it if you needed it!

 

Best types of storage to use

Not all storage media is built equal on the ‘likelihood to fail’ scale.

USB drives are very cheap and convenient, but don’t always have the best capacity and aren’t the most reliable method.

You can also get external disk drives. I’d recommend going down the route of Solid State Drives (SSDs). They’re a little more expensive, but much less likely to fail than standard hard drives as they don’t have any moving parts.

The Samsung T7’s are the ones I use – and the 500gb version should be plenty of space for both your wedding video and photos.

 

Backing up online

Storing your video online eliminates the risk of disk corruption – but does come with a couple of different considerations.

Your first option is to upload your wedding film to a streaming site like YouTube or Vimeo. This doesn’t necessarily mean the whole world has to see it – if you upload it as an ‘unlisted’ video, only people with the link can watch it.

I wouldn’t make this your only storage location though, as you have no control over the websites. If Youtube or Vimeo go down for whatever reason, there’s nothing you can do.

Another alternative is cloud storage sites like dropbox. This is a good secure solution, but depending on the file size you might need to pay a subscription fee for hosting it there.

 

If you have any questions please just give me a shout – I know this can all seem a bit complicated!