Dustin Glendinning — JOUR 537

Backup

Since I am a nerd, I thought it would be good to share how I backup my photos. It can not be emphasized enough how important it is to backup; computer hardware is prone to failure, though I’ve been fortunate to not have to deal with any kind of hard drive crash.
I’ve read a few other good workflows (Frank Chimero, designer/illustrator; Chase Jarvis, photographer), and what I do now isn’t exactly how I would like to, but it does the bare minimum and it’s what I can afford. 

Yes, the main idea is to have, at the very least, two separate copies of everything, apart from what’s on your local hard drive. 

• After importing my pictures from the camera, if I don’t have time to edit them right away, I copy them straight over to my external. I like to copy my edits over at the same time just so I don’t forget to copy them over later.
• My photos are sorted in the Pictures folder by: year > month > event. 
• If I make edits, or don’t have time to copy a folder over to the external, I label it gray if it’s not on the external, purple if it’s ready to burn to disc (right click in Finder).
• Every 4GB, I burn a DVD. I recently found Disco, a program that helps to burn discs when you have more data than fits on one disc. 
• I have a text document that lists what is on each disc, I update this before I burn each disc so if I need to pull something up, I know which disc it is. This text document is backed up in dropbox.
  
  
• I write the disc number and date it was burned on the disc. Ideally, I’ll duplicate these discs every 3-5 years, because (though I haven’t tested it) discs do deteriorate over time.
• Once I have a folder of pictures on the external and a DVD, I delete everything but the _edit folder to save space on my local hard drive. I never delete a folder, even if it’s empty. I may delete its contents if it’s backed up, but keeping the folder on my local shows everything I’ve shot, and that folder, with its contents is backed up. I typically only have the past calendar year’s pictures on my local hard drive.

That’s it, for now. What I’d like to do is clone the external every two weeks or so, and have a friend keep that at their place. That would be to protect against theft or fire. I’ll probably have two clones of the external eventually, make one every two weeks, and one monthly or annually.  And the last step would be to upload everything to the cloud, probably through Amazon’s service that charges for what you upload/download, though there are others I’m considering that charge a monthly fee for unlimited storage. 

I know this makes me extra crazy, but, like Frank said, storage is cheap and data is important, so why not? I also realize I’ve been posting a lot of tech related topics and I plan on talking about my story soon; I think I will when I’m a little closer to the editing process.