Backup Your Images
I can't stress enough how important it is to ensure that you make regular backups of your images. If you don't, you run the risk of loosing your images forever.
A good backup plan should be an integral part of your digital work-flow! Don't rely on a single layer of redundancy to secure your images. After all, you can't afford to loose your images, or worse still loose the image files which you have created for your clients.
There was a time when CD/DVD backups were an economical and effective way to backup your images. But, I have found that with the sheer volume of digital images this method is no longer viable. After all, who wants to end up with 100's of DVD's to search through in the event of a Hard Drive failure? Not me!
The approach that I have taken is fairly simple but has proven to be reliable and effective:
- After taking photo's I transfer them from the flash card to my computer's RAID5 disk array.
- I make a copy of the images onto and external USB Hard Disk drive.
- I have a 2nd USB drive which is stored in a separate physical location.
- I rotate the USB drives on a regular basis so that the off-site backup is as regular as possible.
With this method I have a minimum of 2 copies of my files and any one time. With most of the files I have 3 copies with one copy in a separate physical location.
Not only that, but using a RAID5 disk array as my primary storage also means that I don't have a single point of failure while I am doing the image processing. I could have a hardware failure of one of the hard disks in the array without loosing any files! My disks are also hot swappable, allowing me to replace and rebuild the failed disk without shutting down my computer.