Losing client data is every professional photographers worst nightmare. Aside from the disappointment and disruption to your work, you could potentially make yourself vulnerable to a costly indemnity insurance claim.

Losing images is particularly destructive to a wedding or event photographer’s work as it is unlikely that unique, one-off events will be able to be re-shot. While you may be able to offer a refund or an apology to a heartbroken client, it’s unlikely that they will take the news well and you could end up facing a claim for damages.

Lost data is extremely common amongst photographers, and when a claim is made it is vital that you are covered with professional indemnity insurance. The cover could mean you are able to pay a specialist to retrieve the lost images or compensate your client for the distress the situation has caused.

While photography insurance is a good idea, and often essential for most professional photographers, prevention is better than cure.

Regular back ups are crucial if you are working or travelling as a photographer, but sometimes relying on hard drives and laptops to keep everything safe could mean you still end up losing your entire collection.

One of the easiest and cheapest options for backing up images is online storage. Cloud storage allows you to safely back up all your images online, meaning no more panic about technology failing and letting you down.

Storing data online provides you with a much bigger safety net than memory cards and external hard drives can, and allows you to access your images from anywhere in the world, providing you have internet access.

There is much less chance of images stored online from getting lost or damaged, and some options even allow you to go back and ‘undo’ any erasures you may have made by mistake.

This instantly reduces the potential for mistakes. You can’t spill water on the cloud, have it stolen or leave it in a taxi. With your files backed up online you can rest assured that you’re protected against data loss and your cloud service is doing all the hard work for you.

There is a range of different cloud providers you can choose from, all offering different services and options. DropBox, Amazon Cloud Drive, and Google Drive, are all examples of popular cloud storage providers.

Free accounts don’t usually give you huge amounts of storage space (around 2-5GB is typical) so if you want to store a large collection of images you may have to consider paying a monthly fee. Storage is relatively inexpensive, and depending on your needs you can pay as little as 5p per GB of data.

For an idea on what’s available, this best value cloud storage services article by Which? is a good read.

Don’t put yourself in a vulnerable position. Back your photos up and then back them up to cloud storage. It’s inexpensive and well worth the investment!