If you’re like me, you have an abundance of digital photos filling up hard drives… many hard drives.   There are several different ways photographers are dealing with this.   The issue is not just data storage.   For all the data that you store, you also need to back up that data.  (If you’re not backing up your data, start NOW!!)

Whenever I return from a photo shoot, the first thing I do is copy the images onto a hard drive and I burn a copy of the data onto DVD(s).  I also maintain a duplicate copy of the photos on USB drives.  

SyncToy 2.0 is a nifty free tool provided by Microsoft.  It is available for free download here.   It’s a highly customizable tool for synchronizing files between two hard drives.  When you copy your photos onto your hard drive from your camera, you can then run SyncToy to automatically back them up to a USB drive.   Then you can do some photo editing, RAW processing, retouching, etc. and after you do these edits, run SyncToy again, and it will copy the new files you created since your last backup.   Then if you do later edits to other images on your drive, you can run SyncToy again to find and backup any other files edited on your hard drive.

SyncToy does its backup by copying files, rather than archiving them within a ZIP file or other archive file format.    This is a simple yet powerful tool, worth checking out to see if it might fit well in your workflow!