What a Single Wedding Actually Costs You in Storage

A 45 MP wedding shoot runs about 140 GB once you count RAW files, exported selects and delivery copies. Multiply that by a season of bookings and most photographers can tell you the terabytes. Almost none can tell you the dollar figure — because storage isn’t one purchase, it’s four separate costs with four separate lifespans, and one of them never actually stops billing.

The four places a wedding’s storage cost hides

Every job you deliver passes through the same four stages, and each one has its own price tag:

1. Cards — captured on-site, mirrored across two slots for safety.
2. A working drive — where the job lives while you cull and edit.
3. Local archive — a mirrored pair of drives that hold the finished job after delivery, in case a client needs a reprint years later.
4. Cloud archive — an offsite copy of that same archive, the “1” in the 3-2-1 backup rule.

Cards, working drives and local archive are all one-time hardware purchases that get used across dozens of weddings before they’re replaced — so the honest way to price them per shoot is to amortize the purchase over how many jobs it’ll actually see, the same way you’d amortize a lens.

Doing the math on hardware

A pair of 1 TB CFexpress cards for mirrored dual-slot capture runs close to $750 at 2026 prices (CFexpress 4.0 cards price out around $0.36 per GB at the 1 TB tier, more at smaller capacities). A working pro shooting 25 weddings a year typically replaces that card set every three years for capacity or wear reasons — about 75 weddings of service. That’s $10 per wedding in card cost alone.

A 2 TB working SSD for active edits ran roughly $180 through most of 2025, but a NAND flash shortage — driven by AI data centers buying up the same flash supply consumer drives depend on — has pushed the same drive closer to $300-400 through 2026, with no relief expected before 2027. It still lasts about the same three years and 75-wedding span before it’s swapped for something bigger or faster: roughly $4.65 per wedding, up from $2.40 before the shortage.

A mirrored pair of 4 TB archive drives — the local copy that sits on a shelf after delivery — used to cost around $200. The same shortage has hit hard drives too: a single 4 TB drive that ran $70-80 has been going for $140 or more through 2026, pushing a mirrored pair closer to $280. It still holds roughly 28 weddings’ worth of finished files before it’s full and you buy the next pair: about $10 per wedding, up from $7.

CFexpress card prices have spiked in the same shortage, but swing wildly right now depending on brand and tier — some budget cards are still close to their old prices while premium ones have more than doubled — so the $10-per-wedding card figure above is left as a conservative baseline rather than a number we can currently pin down with confidence.

Add those up and the hardware side of a single wedding’s storage costs around $24-25 now, up from the $19-20 this math worked out to before 2026’s memory and hard-drive shortage — a cost swing that has nothing to do with how many weddings you shot and everything to do with what a drive costs this year. Our storage calculator runs this same math against your actual camera and frame count instead of the season averages used here.

The cost that doesn’t stop when the job does

Cards, working drives and local archive are all sunk costs — you pay once, they depreciate, you replace them. Cloud archive is different: it’s a subscription tied to how much data you’re keeping, and it renews every month for as long as that wedding’s files exist in the cloud, which for most photographers is “forever, because deleting a client’s wedding feels wrong.”

At Backblaze B2’s current rate of $6.95 per TB per month, archiving one 140 GB wedding costs about $0.97 a month — under a dollar. Easy to ignore. But that dollar doesn’t go away, and it doesn’t come alone. Shoot 25 weddings a year and keep every one backed up indefinitely, and by year four you’re not paying for four years of weddings — you’re paying for the cumulative 100 weddings sitting in the archive, all at once, every month:

• Year 1 (25 weddings, 3.5 TB archived): ~$24/month
• Year 2 (50 weddings, 7 TB): ~$49/month
• Year 4 (100 weddings, 14 TB): ~$97/month, or just under $1,200/year

That’s the number most cost-of-doing-business spreadsheets miss: a single year’s storage line item isn’t flat, it’s a slope, and it keeps climbing for as long as you keep booking clients and never pruning the archive. None of the hardware costs above behave that way — they reset every time you buy the next drive. Cloud archive is the only piece of this stack that compounds.

Where this belongs on your books

None of this is an argument against cloud backup — an undelivered wedding is not a file you can reshoot, and $97 a month is nothing next to what one lost gallery costs a business in refunds and reputation. It’s an argument for pricing it correctly. If storage shows up in your cost of doing business as a flat annual guess instead of a per-shoot number that grows with your archive, you’re under-costing every job you book this year to cover a bill that’s still climbing from jobs you delivered three years ago.

The fix is simple: price storage per wedding using the amortized hardware numbers above, then separately budget the cloud line as a number that rises with your total archived weddings, not your current season’s bookings. Run your real camera and frame count through the storage calculator, plug the result into your day-rate math, and the number stops being a shrug and starts being a line item — the same as insurance, the same as gear.

If cost breakdowns like this are useful to you as a running habit, they turn up now and then in our field-notes emails.