Tusk is a Mac app that automatically backs up your project folders to multiple locations and tracks where every file lives — even when your drives aren't connected.
After talking to a lot of photographers about how they back up their work, one thing comes up almost every time: most of them aren't fully happy with their setup.
If you shoot professionally, or even just as a more serious hobby, chances are you have something cobbled together that mostly works, but it either feels too manual or you're never quite sure whether your files are safely backed up across multiple drives.
Even worse, almost all of the photographers I spoke to, wouldn't know for sure exactly on which of their drives which project is backed up. They usually plug in drive by drive to find projects from older clients.
A single shoot might mean 2,000 RAW files, a catalog file with every edit and rating from the past three years, and a folder of final exports for the client. Each of those is a separate thing that needs its own coverage, and most backup tools only address one of them.
The tools photographers tend to reach for: Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, the built-in catalog backup in Lightroom or Capture One. Each covers one piece, but none of them fit perfectly what most photographers actually need to safely back up their work.
TL;DR: Most photographers need to back up three things: RAW imports, their editing catalog, and final exports. The common tools each cover one of those at best. A single tool that watches all three folders continuously, verifies every transfer, and tracks where everything is across drives covers the whole workflow.
What You Actually Need to Back Up
Most photographers are mainly concerned about getting the RAW files off the card. That's just the beginning. The full list of what needs coverage:
Your RAW imports folder is the obvious one. Every file from the card, before any editing.
Your editing catalog is less obvious but equally important. Whether you use Lightroom, Capture One, or another tool, your catalog or library file is a single file that contains every edit, rating, flag, color label, and crop you've applied across every shoot you've ever done. Lose it and your RAW files are still there, but they're unedited originals with no organization. Years of culling and grading, gone.
Your final exports matter too. The client got JPEGs or TIFFs, not RAWs. Those delivery files need to be preserved alongside the source files, because re-exporting months later is not always possible to do identically.
The Built-in Catalog Backup Problem
Lightroom and Capture One both have built-in catalog backup. It runs on a schedule, creates a copy of the catalog file on your Mac, and that's it.
It does not back up your RAW files. It does not copy the backup to an external drive or to the cloud. It puts a second copy on the same machine as the original, which means a drive failure takes both.
If your Mac dies, the built-in backup is gone with it.
The built-in backup is worth keeping on because it protects against catalog corruption, which does happen. But it's not a real backup. The catalog folder needs to go to an external drive and ideally a cloud destination as well, and it needs to stay current every time you sit down to edit.
If you want a framework for thinking about how many copies you need and where, the 3-2-1 backup strategy is a good starting point.
The Card Reformat Question
You come home from a shoot. You import your files into your editing software. Everything shows up. Is it safe to reformat the card?
Not yet.
The import copies files to your chosen folder, but that folder is probably on your Mac's internal drive or a single external drive. One copy is not a backup.
The card is safe to reformat when every file from the shoot exists on at least two separate drives, and when you've confirmed those copies are not corrupted.
Most backup tools give you no way to check this. You'd have to open each destination, browse the folder, and verify by eye. Nobody does that.
The right system answers the question automatically. Before you reformat, you can see that every file exists on drive A and drive B (or drive A and Backblaze B2), that each copy was verified with a checksum, and that nothing is missing. As soon as you've confirmed that, you can wipe your card.
With Tusk, the SD card ingest workflow handles this directly. You plug in the card, pick your destinations, and Tusk streams directly from the card to all of them simultaneously with BLAKE3 checksum verification on every file. Once every destination confirms a clean copy, the card is safe.
The Culling Workflow and Backup Timing
The most frequent gap within photographers backup strategy sits between import and culling.
You import your files, start flagging keepers, reject the rest. Your editing software is writing to the catalog continuously as you work. Those ratings and flags live in the catalog file, not in the RAW files. If something happens to the catalog mid-session, the work is gone.
A continuous backup system handles this without you thinking about it. Every time your software saves the catalog, the updated file gets picked up and pushed to your backup destinations automatically. This means you don't have to set an automatic schedule or, even worse, trigger the backup manually. Instead it happens on every save, modification or new creation of a file.
Watching the project folder continuously instead of running on a schedule is the difference between losing a culling session and not.
High Volume Without the Overhead
A shoot with 2,000 RAW files from a mirrorless camera is manageable. The files are individually smaller than video. Ingest is fast. But the sheer number of files means a file-by-file verification step matters more.
Silent corruption on one of 2,000 RAW files is easy to miss entirely until you're delivering to a client and one image from a key moment won't open.
The way dedicated ingest software catches this is through checksum verification. Think of it as a fingerprint of a file: the software computes it on the source before the copy, then computes it again on the destination after. If both fingerprints match, the file arrived intact. If they don't, something went wrong during the transfer and you still have the card to go back to. Different tools use different algorithms for this (MD5, SHA, BLAKE3) but the principle is the same. Tusk uses BLAKE3, which is both fast and reliable for this kind of work.
Finding a Shoot Months Later
Six months after wrapping a job, a client emails asking for the RAW files. You're pretty sure they're backed up somewhere, but you've got four external drives and no memory of which one that shoot ended up on. Two of them haven't been plugged in since the project wrapped.
Most backup tools don't help you here. They back things up but don't index where everything is. Finding something means plugging in drives until you hit the right one.
Tusk tracks every file's location across all drives, even when those drives are unplugged. You can look up any shoot by project name and see exactly which drive it's on before you plug anything in. If you need to restore, one click pulls from whichever destination is fastest.
You already know how fast shoots stack up. After a few years without an index, finding anything is a lot of drive-swapping.
Deleting Local Files Safely
At some point you'll want to clear space on your Mac. The shoot is done, the client is happy, and you're pretty sure everything is backed up. But pretty sure isn't the same as knowing.
Manually verifying that every RAW file from a shoot is confirmed on two separate drives before you delete the local copies is a real hassle. Most people skip it and just hope for the best. That's where files actually get lost. Whenever you want to clear space quickly and just assume (or hoping) that everything is covered.
As far as I'm aware, Tusk is the only tool that handles both sides of this: it backs up your files and then lets you delete local copies only once it can confirm they're fully covered. The Delete Local feature checks that every destination actually has each file before anything gets removed. If a copy is missing or unverified, the delete is blocked.
The Actual Workflow
The setup is a one-time thing per project. After that, it runs itself.
- Ingest the card. Plug in the SD card, click "Ingest SD card" in Tusk, select your destinations (an external drive and Backblaze B2, for example). Tusk streams directly from the card to both simultaneously. Once every file is verified on both, reformat the card.
- Add your catalog folder. Point Tusk at your Lightroom or Capture One catalog folder with the same destinations. From that point, every catalog save goes to backup automatically. The culling session, the color grade, the metadata, all of it.
- Add your exports folder. Client deliveries get covered automatically as you export them.
From there, Tusk runs in the background. When you need to free up local space, it shows you what's safe to delete and blocks anything that isn't fully covered yet.
When a client asks for something from six months ago, you look it up in Tusk, see which drive it's on, plug in that drive, and restore with one click.
What the Other Tools Don't Cover
Time Machine backs up your Mac's internal drive. If your RAW files and catalog are on external drives (which they often are, because the files are too large for internal storage), Time Machine doesn't cover them. This is the single biggest gap for photographers.
Built-in catalog backup in Lightroom and Capture One only protects against catalog corruption. It puts the backup on the same machine as the original. Drive failure takes both.
Carbon Copy Cloner runs on a schedule. It doesn't watch your catalog folder continuously, so changes between sync runs are at risk. It also has no per-file backup status, so you can't confirm a file is safe to delete.
Backblaze as a cloud backup is slow for large RAW imports. Uploading 20GB after a shoot takes hours. It works as a third copy for archiving, but it's not fast enough to be your primary backup layer at ingest time.
The gap all of them share: none of them track where your files are across drives when those drives are unplugged.
Tusk is $79 one-time, or $49 during the current launch offer. 14-day free trial, no credit card or email required.
FAQ
The built-in catalog backup in both Lightroom and Capture One puts a copy on the same machine as the original, which doesn't help if your drive fails. The catalog folder needs to go to at least one external drive and ideally a cloud destination too. The simplest approach is adding your catalog folder to a continuous backup tool like Tusk, which watches the folder and syncs every save to your chosen destinations automatically.
Not right after the import completes. The import puts files in one place. That's one copy, not a backup. The card is safe to reformat once every file exists on at least two separate drives and each copy has been verified with a checksum. A tool like Tusk confirms this automatically during ingest, so you know exactly when the card is safe.
No. Time Machine only backs up your Mac's internal drive by default. RAW imports and catalog files stored on external drives are excluded. For those you need a dedicated backup tool that watches specific folders on external drives.
For photographers who need to cover RAW imports, an editing catalog, and final exports, a continuous folder-watching tool works better than scheduled backup. Tusk watches all three folders automatically, verifies every file with BLAKE3 checksums, and tracks where files are across all drives even when those drives are unplugged. It also handles SD card ingest directly, streaming simultaneously to multiple destinations.
With most backup tools, you'd need to plug in drives and browse manually. Tusk indexes every file's location across all your drives, including drives that are currently unplugged. You can look up any project by name, see which drive it's on, and restore with one click once the drive is connected.