Back up first, edit second (I mean this)
Okay. Before we touch the editor at all, we're doing this.
I'm going to repeat myself in this lesson. I do that on purpose. This is the one thing in the whole class I'll say more than once, because I've watched people skip it and lose things they can't get back, and I don't want that to be you.
Back up your originals before you edit anything.
Not after. Not "I'll do it once I'm done cutting the video." Before. The editing is the fun part. It's also the least important part. If something happens to your original photos or footage, the finished video doesn't matter, because you've lost the raw material of your family's history. That's not a maybe. That's just true.
Why this is the whole ballgame
Here's the thing. Editing software mostly doesn't touch your original files. It creates a project that points at them and remembers what you did. That's good, because it means you can experiment without ruining anything. But it also means your original files are still just sitting in one folder, on one device, with no protection, unless you back them up yourself.
A laptop dies. A phone gets dropped in a toilet, which happens more than you'd think. A hard drive that's been sitting in a closet since 2011 just stops spinning one day. I've had people bring me a "corrupted" SD card like it's a mystery. It's not a mystery. Storage fails. That's what it does eventually. The question is only whether you have a copy somewhere else when it happens.
What "backed up" actually means
One copy is not a backup. One copy is a single point of failure with a nice label on it.
I want you to have your family history footage and photos in at least two places, ideally three, and ideally not all in the same house. Here's a setup that works for most people and doesn't cost much:
- Original files stay where they landed. Your phone, your computer, wherever you first pulled them off the old tape or camera.
- Copy to an external hard drive. You can get a decent one for less money than you'd think — cheaper than replacing a phone, way cheaper than losing forty years of home movies. Copy the whole folder over. Don't just drag a few favorites.
- Copy to cloud storage, or a second physical drive kept somewhere else. A drive at your sister's house counts. So does a free-tier cloud account. The point is that a fire or a flood or a coffee spill in your house doesn't take out every copy at once.
Do this before you open the editing software. If you only do one thing from this whole lesson, do this.
A story about why I'm this firm about it
I had a guy in a past session — I'll call him Chad, because that's his name — who asked me to help him fix some choppy footage from his daughter's dance recital. We sat down, and about ten minutes in I realized the actual problem wasn't the choppiness. The actual problem was that this was the only copy of that footage that existed anywhere. It lived on one phone. No backup, no cloud sync, nothing.
I spent way more time that day teaching him about backups than teaching him about editing. He was annoyed. He'd come for editing help and gotten a lecture instead. But he set up a backup system before he left, and as far as I know he hasn't lost a video since. Sometimes the useful thing isn't the thing someone asked for.
While we're on the subject of files sitting untouched
This connects to something I said in our first session and I'll say it again here: label everything before you touch the editor. When you're backing things up, this is also your moment to rename that folder called "100_PANA" or "DCIM" into something like "Grandma_tapes_1994" so future-you can find it. You're already handling the files. Do the naming now, not later, because later you won't remember what any of it is.
A quiet caution
If you're digitizing old tapes or transferring off an old camcorder, do that transfer once, carefully, and then leave the original tape alone. Don't keep re-running fragile old tape through an old machine to "double check" something. Old tape stretches and old machines chew. Get your digital copy, verify it plays all the way through — I checked mine, start to finish, before I trusted it — and then set the physical tape aside.
Before next time
Get your originals backed up in at least two places before our next session. Bring your laptop and whatever drive or account you're using, and we'll look at your setup together if you want a second pair of eyes on it.