Is there a reason to save both raw and jpeg?

That is indeed the usual reason: jpeg to share quickly with others, RAW to edit yourself later. That's how I did it myself with reportage photography at association activities, where you dump your photos on the laptop of the editor of the club magazine immediately afterwards.

There used to be an advantage: if you put both on your PC, Windows Explorer could only show a small thumbnail of a jpg, but nowadays you get that with a raw as well, so there indeed is no advantage anymore.

The reason why you use 2 cards is therefore just as valid as the reason to shoot in both RAW and JPG: zero. The chance of your card suddenly no longer working is also zero, after all.

A matter of knowledge: the chips on a card simply don't break. It only goes wrong if you physically mistreat such a wafer.

Funny that you do apply the concept of knowledge to the subject of your article, but not to the question of why you would actually use 2 cards at the same time.

As a nature photographer, I have little or no time to change lenses or put together a nice composition. It is mostly a matter of shooting and focusing on an eye/head etc. As a result, almost all photos are cropped and edited in raw before being saved as a jpeg file for publication. By saving both files, there is never any discussion about ownership rights and the authenticity of the photo. The raw files still contain all the info. Many photos are also used for identifying and documenting species. (e.g. butterfly species with differences in colour/pattern)

To quickly show the 'approximate result' on location, I also save JPEGs. At the office I just throw them away.

Narrow-minded and prejudiced. Not an article but an opinion piece that you should post on Facebook. From now on, only publish articles that people can get something positive out of / learn something from and not to "put them right" or prove that you are right.
There can be, in my opinion, several valid reasons to photograph in RAW and JPG. And these reasons are valid and you cannot disagree with them. Maybe they are not convenient for many or other reasons carry more weight but that does not make them any less true. I hope you do respond to this post because in a previous article in which I disagreed with you and you asked me to explain it, I subsequently received no further comment...but you challenge me to respond... here it goes:
1. As others have already indicated, our camera is also used for holiday snapshots or photos in between. Not all that exciting or important but still nice to keep or share. I don't have the time/desire to edit all those photos. That is wasted time for me. A jpg is almost always sufficient. If I happen to have a nice photo among them where the jpg does not produce the end result, I can fall back on the raw.
2. If I can use 2 cards (D750), then I have raw on 2 and jpg on the other. If I shoot with only 1 card (D500: SD only), then I save both (raw&jpg) on 1 card.
I don't see that as a backup (although the D750's setup is somewhat of one because I have never had a card become corrupt. And if I ever have a failure, then "so be it". The photos I take now are not a matter of life and death.
The advantage of a jpg is that the in-camera functions such as noise reduction and all the other settings are fairly well optimized for your camera. Although you can do much more with RAW, I like having the jpg as a reference. Sometimes I go a bit too far in my editing or instead remain too cautious and can then look at the jpg with my left eye. Sometimes the jpg turns out to be even nicer than my edit. So that gives me a benchmark/guideline.
At a wedding or other ceremony, it is important to have a good backup but this can/must also be in the form of an extra camera. But in this case I would always choose 2x raw.
3. For me, perhaps the most important reason is that when you take a lot of photos, (I often photograph birds and then come home with many hundreds of photos) where there are many similarities between photos, selecting the best photos is a real challenge. And then it doesn't help if your PC experiences a delay because of loading a RAW file.
I have a decent PC but there is simply a delay and when switching between photos it has to go "instantly".
And this is where the jpg comes in handy!
With a freeware tool like XnView I browse through the jpgs super fast. This allows me to select the best photos much faster and load only those into my Lightroom catalog. To make things even easier, I connected a keypad from Action to my PC and programmed the buttons. This allows me to scroll through the photos with one hand, zoom in and out, also go straight to 100% and back, plus simply give a rating. The other hand is on the mouse to move things around a bit so you can immediately view the details. After the selection I copy the corresponding RAW files (based on the jp-file name) to the right folder so they can be loaded into LR.
This works for me so much faster and more clearly than uploading hundreds of photos into LR and selecting them there or viewing and selecting the raw files. And the jpg Large Fine is a much better representation than the embedded jpg in the raw file, so my selection can be much more critical.

And perhaps there are even more reasons that I can't think of that quickly or that others have already thought of. The fact that you don't use it or can't think of a reason is no reason to try to undermine it here.
That does not do this site any credit.

My 2 cents (or in this case more like 5

Last week one of my cards gave up the ghost. My first defective card in 20 years. The second card was my lifesaver. I write RAW and JPEG to both cards, the latter at a lower resolution. This is so I can serve my clients quickly. A large JPEG is then just inconvenient.

I also use RAW and JPEG for the same reason as Marc and Edwin above. I use the JPEG images to send directly to the interested parties/photo desks. RAW for careful post-processing when photos are going to be ordered/published.

The reason I save both versions to two cards is that I quickly send a particular jpg to my phone with Snapbridge and share it with my enthusiasts.

Nando is right to make the backup in RAW because he shoots in RAW.
If you shoot in JPEG (those people still exist) the backup can also be set to jpeg. Shooting in RAW and/or JPEG remains everyone's own choice.
Obviously I choose RAW because I want to edit photos.
I first had a camera for several years that only supported JPEG, even then I also edited the photos with quite nice results.

Cards usually don't fail during use in the camera but usually when being used in the PC. Removing cards while data is still being written to or read from them is the most common cause. The camera will be switched off much more often than a PC when removing a card.

I doubt whether all the settings in the camera for a JPEG are shown in the RAW photo in the same way after conversion. By the way, I always photograph in RAW, which I convert to JPEG after editing in PhSh for a print. I do save the latter alongside the PSD.

Wasn't mentioned yet: an older version of PS that can't read the latest NEFs, so they first have to be converted to DNG. In that case, a series of JPEGs is quite interesting for quickly making a selection and only processing the selected files from NEF > DNG > editing. Sorry, I'm just a hobby photographer.

I set my canon EOS700D to "RAW+1/4 circle L" for the first time and took a few test shots. When I then load those into Photo galery I get 2 photos, one with the addition CR@ and the other with jpg. Can I now use the one with CR2 if I am going to try out Ligthroom?

Lex, I don't believe people here are waiting for your epistles, an initiator throws out an idea, then you can respond to it or not, as a commenter you don't decide where subjects belong but the initiator does, a great many of the readers here can all say exactly what kind of gear they have and how they work with it, what you're doing looks more like showing off.

I save the photo as a RAW file on both cards in the camera. The RAW photo is transferred to the hard drive on the computer, which synchronizes with the cloud, and to the external drive.. After editing the RAW images, I save the final result as a J-peg. Some of those J-Pegs go to the digital photo book and to family and friends

Another reason to use jpeg alongside RAW is that you can scroll through these more easily. The RAw files with 64 Mb open too slowly.

Donald Willemsen wrote on Tuesday 5 October 2021 at 15:28  | reply

Nando, I agree with your conclusion. However, I can imagine that a photojournalist saves in raw and JPG. He can send the JPG directly to the editorial office of a newspaper and later edit the RAW as he sees fit for exhibitions and competitions such as World Pressphoto.

Another important point is the fact, which mode do you photograph in, I almost always photograph in the 'M' mode, then you always have to edit the RAW file, you can't do that as well with jpg/jpeg as with RAW, saving to the other card in jpg then serves no purpose at all.

As an older, modest photographer, I can honestly do nothing other than give Nando 100% agreement. I work with a Canon D5 MKIII, which has two memory slots, and yet I stick to the bad habit of using one slot (CompactFlash) on which I make both JPG and RAW. I actually use the other card (a larger Scandisk) simply as a reserve in case my first card should become full and I have no spare with me. What Nando suggests seems much more useful to me.

One more thing: Indeed, as has been repeated several times above, a card in the camera very rarely breaks. Yet it happened to me, in Malaysia, that I bought a cheap card reader with which I wanted to transfer my photos from my card to my PC. What turned out was that, during that attempt, my card proved difficult to read or even completely unreadable, and the file sizes of my shots (normally around 20-30MB) had suddenly been reduced to 100 to 200kb!!!!. So the next day I had to retrace my steps and photograph everything again. With a second card -provided I had not also put it in the card reader-I would have been saved.
Another final thing: I hear people say: "all that fuss with editing seems silly. I quote: "Endless post-processing is basically a trick and does not correspond to reality! And that is precisely what we want to capture" If that is your opinion, then just carry on like that, but photography does possess possibilities that, unfortunately, you have not yet discovered at all. In response to this: "I have not yet made a single photo that was worse after post-processing than the original".
Finally, the photo your device makes, without any editing, is not at all a representation of reality, as is claimed. Remember this important rule: Photography is primarily about seeing things, not only as they are, but also as they could have been"
Nb. I will certainly follow Nando's advice, the learning curve to good editing is steep and requires effort, commitment and experience, but it is of immense and tremendous importance. Lack of knowledge in this area is often the main reason for criticism of those who do engage in post-processing.

I'm not a star at editing photos yet. That's why I keep the original RAW files of all my good photos. When I'm more skilled at editing later on, I can still make improvements.

I have been photographing in RAW and JPG for years. Not as a backup, but sometimes out of convenience so I don't have to do RAW edits. As long as the JPG is good enough. I always edit photos for exhibitions and specials in RAW. Importing into LR, which I don't do too often, I'm more of a PS person, I only do that in RAW. In many cases I find the JPG from the camera good enough to send on to the person in question. After almost every session I take the photos off the camera, onto HD, and from there backups are made to other media. If you have to make a selection from many photos for a photoshoot and edit everything from RAW, I find it too time-consuming, partly possibly due to my lack of experience with LR to automate various things. In addition, I have never managed to edit a RAW in such a way that it is the same as the corresponding JPG from the camera. (But perhaps you shouldn't look at that) So I am not an experienced editor either, and only do what is strictly necessary.

A fun discussion has nevertheless arisen about perhaps a "simple" subject. Personally, on my Pentax K3-III (yes, I'm still that old faithful Pentax photographer 😎) I use slot 1 for RAW and slot 2 for JPG. Nando's story made me start doubting, but after reading on I decided to leave the setting as it is, so that when on holiday or away for a weekend I can quickly upload a JPG to my mobile.

I can imagine that this may be different for professional photographers. I once had an SD card that "refused" to work, but I managed to "recover" it with Sandisk software.

All in all, a fun interesting discussion Nando!

Cameras often store a ‘preview’ inside the RAW file and I can use a HEX editor to extract JPG files from a RAW file. A JPEG photo is still better than no photo at all. I use the HxD editor.

Incidentally, there are programs on the market that claim to repair a corrupt RAW photo. In reality, these tools rarely manage to repair even a corrupt JPEG file.
Extracting JPEG data from a RAW file

To ‘extract’ a JPEG using the HEX editor:

I search within the file for a JPEG header (FF D8)
I continue searching for a JPEG end-of-file (EOF) marker (FF D9)
I select the data in between
I copy this data to a new file with a .JPG extension.

Sometimes there are multiple JPGs present, a low and a higher resolution version, depending on the RAW format. Because this is a repetitive and cumbersome task, I went looking for a program that could do this automatically for me.

I discovered many tools that can do this with intact but not corrupt RAW files. Apparently, they use the structure (markers) within the RAW file to locate the JPEG data. In a corrupt file, these structures may be damaged.
Meet JpegDigger

For a client, I had to sift through such a large number of Nikon RAW files (.NEF) for JPEG data that I decided it would be faster to create a small tool. I later adapted it to also search through RAW formats from other camera manufacturers.

The initial ‘necessity’ accurately reflects the status of this little tool. It is actually intended for personal use and is therefore ‘as is’. JpegDigger is free and I provide no form of warranty whatsoever. It is reasonably slow but faster than manually extracting using a HEX editor.
Using JpegDigger to extract JPGs from corrupt RAW files

Dear Nando,
An interesting article that has been read a lot but has also received many responses!

In my opinion, there are many reasons why someone either photographs in both formats or only in RAW or perhaps only in Jpg. Professional or hobbyist, being able to post-process or not. I once understood that professional sports photography (football) is often done in Jpg so that you can scroll quickly on the camera and send it straight to the newspaper. I seem to remember Pim Ras saying this during a lecture at KE, but don't hold me to it.

With wedding photography, you certainly don't want to take any risks with memory cards. I can imagine that you replace them regularly.

Since I attended Wout de Jong's two-day LR workshop at Calumet, my way of working has changed. Since that course, I photograph only in RAW, no longer in RAW+Jpg and also on two cards. Since that course, I obviously import the photos into LR.
Depending on the type of photoshoot and the number of photos, I either select everything at once or do it in stages. Those stages are always selecting, doing something else for a while and then looking again, selecting and so arriving at the photos I really want to use. I do that, for example, after a day of nature photography with the photography club or after a major reportage with hundreds of photos.
After a number of basic edits in LR and PS, I save the photo as a TIFF in LR. From that TIFF file, I can easily generate Jpgs via an export, which are renamed at the same time, and I deliver them. I no longer keep those Jpgs, Wout's initially shocking tip... Keeping them is not necessary because I usually only need to deliver Jpgs once and I can make new ones very quickly if necessary.
Keeping RAW files and TIFFs does take up more space, but then you come back to what comes up in many responses: what kind of computer and (external) HDD do you have? A good computer and external HDDs cost money and you can only spend that once. So it makes sense that not everyone can do that and that they therefore make their own choices.
All that remains is one question: how do you save the edited RAW files?

I myself use RAW exclusively.

Someone I know who has WiFi on their camera and can thus link it with their smartphone, I recommend using both RAW (because it gives the best results in post-processing) and JPEG for photos that will be sent via WiFi right away. I never advise using JPEG only.
I compare JPEG to the analog print and RAW to the analog negative. The negative is the most important thing to me; and so is the RAW file.

My RAW photos sometimes contain a lot of noise ( especially at high ISOs ) and apparently I haven't really mastered noise reduction ( reducing noise ... sharpness decreases ) . In some cases I don't get anywhere near the same result as the jpeg photo

Pff, basically a disguised old-fashioned RAW-JPG discussion, with the familiar arguments for why RAW is so much better. The JPG photos in the article are indeed not great, but it’s also not that difficult to make a bad JPG 😉
Every photographer has their own workflow. There are certainly arguments for shooting only in RAW, there are also arguments to be found for shooting in JPG, and there are also arguments for sometimes or always doing both. They have been mentioned and are also fairly generally known. The reasons will differ from person to person.
If you’re a professional photographer, it makes perfect sense that you never shoot in JPG, and then you probably won’t be into it either. That’s why I also find the article rather tendentious.

I photograph holiday photos in RAW and JPG. JPG to be able to use them immediately on the holiday blog and to share them quickly with family and friends. Once home, you can 'dump' the JPGs, and keep only the RAWs.

I only save my files in RAW, sometimes did send them directly to my phone = jpeg to be able to share (Sony a77II)

p.s. one more question, you write:
Without any editing, you can therefore create a jpeg of your raw file with the press of a button. It will then look the same as the jpeg from the camera.

how? When I load my RAW, it often looks very different from the jpeg.
That is why it gets edited, but if I know how to get it like this in one go, then I indeed no longer need to save a jpeg (see my previous comment)
Thank you.