Backing Up Before You Leave the Venue

Dana Whitfield · 3 July 2026

The cards in your pocket are a single point of failure carrying something that cannot be reshot.

Dual Slots, Used Properly

If the camera writes to two cards, set it to mirror rather than overflow. Overflow gives you more capacity. Mirroring gives you a copy, which is the thing you actually need.

Smaller cards, more of them. A single enormous card means a single failure takes the whole day rather than an hour of it.

Split Them Up

Shot cards go somewhere separate from the camera bag from the moment they come out. Different pocket, different bag, different person.

The failure mode this protects against is not corruption, it is the bag. Bags get left in cars, in taxis and on pavements.

Copy Before Sleeping

Two copies on two devices before you go to bed, however late it is. Not tomorrow. Tomorrow is when the card reader turns out to be broken.

It is twenty minutes at the end of a fourteen-hour day and it is the least negotiable twenty minutes in the job.