I've lost footage exactly once in ten years, early on, a corrupted card with no backup, and it taught me more about storage discipline than any amount of good advice would have. What I run now is boring on purpose. Boring and repeatable beats clever every single time when the cost of a mistake is a client's entire event.
The three-copy rule, no exceptions
Every card gets offloaded to two separate physical drives before it's reformatted, full stop, regardless of how tight the schedule is or how much I trust a particular card. One drive travels with me, one stays in a bag that never leaves the hotel room or the car, physically separated in case one gets lost, stolen, or damaged. A third copy goes to cloud storage once I'm back on reliable internet, usually within 48 hours of the shoot.
Why I stopped trusting a single drive type
I run a mix of portable SSDs for speed during the actual edit and a couple of spinning hard drives for the long-term archive copies, because SSDs and HDDs tend to fail in different ways and for different reasons. Betting an entire archive on one drive technology feels like an unnecessary single point of failure when a second drive type costs relatively little extra.
- Two physical copies before any card gets reformatted, always
- Keep the copies physically separated during travel
- Mix SSD and HDD for the archive, don't bet on one failure mode
The step people skip that actually matters most
Verifying the copy, not just initiating it, is the step I see other shooters skip constantly. A checksum or even just a manual spot-check of a few random files after every transfer takes a couple of extra minutes and has caught silent transfer errors for me more than once. Nobody enjoys this part of the job. It's also the entire reason I've only lost footage once instead of many times over a decade of shoots.