Preface

A while back, Photographer Chase Jarvis (you know, of the awesome commercial work ilk), posted his complete work-flow – from
shooting through post production to the final cut. Quite the interesting video, and well worth a look if you haven’t already
seen it. “What if I have seen it” you ask? Well – watch it again! It really is quite informative.

Here it is, in case you missed it, or want a refresher.

As you might have noticed, one of the most important pieces in the video, and one that is near and dear to my heart, is the topic of data. More specifically data backup. A very, very important practice that everyone out there should be doing to at least some degree.
I love how Chase has his setup, and would love to accomplish something to same level, but let’s face it – I don’t have the same
income as Mr. Jarvis. But my data is still important to me and I still want to ensure that it is safe and sound, right?

Well, today I want to take you through my own little scenario, and let you know what I do to make sure my data is backed up and secure.
It may not be as in depth (or nearly as pretty as his!) as what you see in the video, but it will still provide you with secure data. Ready? Here we go!

RAW DATA

RAW data is referring to the original, unedited copies of your work Whether it be still images, video, .jpgs, or the RAW files – these are what comes
out of your camera BEFORE you import them into you choice of editing software. After a shoot, I will take the memory card with all of the images
and back them up on my laptop and an external hard drive. I am using Windows and a 500GB Seagate portable hard drive. I do a straight copy and paste from the memory card to the laptop, and then another to the hard drive. During this process, I also take the opportunity to rename the files. That way I don’t have to worry about it when I get back to the office. Since it is just me over here, I don’t have as many variables to consider as a larger firm, and my naming convention follows like this: yyyymmdd_shoot-name_camera.ext . (Similarly, the folder structure follows the same idea. yyyy-->yyyymmdd-->project-->shoot-name.

To make this as easy and simple as possible, I use Adobe’s venerable Lightroom 3 platform (check it out for 30 days free!) I have been using Lightroom since it’s early conception, and it just keeps getting better and better. In the new LR3, this task of importing and renaming is made stoopid simple. The newly redesigned import dialog allows us to not only import our images into the Lightroom
catalog, but also to rename and make an additional copy elsewhere. See the screen grabs for a more visual reference.

In the above I’ve underlined the areas that I am talking about (albeit poorly). Since I am working off of my desktop for this post, the settings are a little off, but you get the general idea. When LR3 imports your images, it will not only copy them off of the memory card to the specified location (while renaming them), but it will also dump another renamed copy in another folder of your choosing. Saving this as a template to refer back to is another huge benefit of this method. Once I’ve set up the general properties, it is a simple as adding a folder for the specific shoot I am importing. For a more in depth, full featured review check out this video

Now, I have essentially three copies of my images while traveling. One on the memory card, one on the laptop and the third on the external. The important thing to remember here, and easily forgotten, is to not put all of these in one bag! If you loose that one bag, then it doesn’t matter how many copies you made…their lost and you are SOL! Keep the memory cards with the camera, the external in another bag and
the laptop elsewhere (or whatever combo makes you feel warm and fuzzy).

Production DATA

Once I get back to the office, I take the external hard drive and copy the folder structure into my production system. This completes the RAW data set. All of this “raw” data is saved on two internal hard drives set to mirror each other via a RAID1 config (same as Chase’s). This means that there are two copies on two hard drives, but the system only “sees” them as one. If one drive fails, there is another and vice versa. This set up is easy and
as prices fall, less expensive than one might imagine. I then have a small utility to mirror everything from this set up to another set of hard disks that will be the “production” area, keeping my original unedited files safe from my fumbling fingers and click happy mouse/pen.

Once I have everything in the production area, I then re-import everything into LR3 using the “add” feature in the import dialog. This allows me to use the existing folder structure, and just make Lightroom aware of the new images. Nothing additional needs to be done (because I have already renamed the files and put them in their proper folders, remember?) except to allow the program to index them for the Production catalog. Now I am ready to edit to my heart’s content.

But what about off-site backups, or more redundancy you are asking? Well – I am glad you did! There are a few more things I do to make sure that everything (from the RAW data, to the production system) is taken care of. Again, I like efficiency for low cost, and there isn’t anything better than the Mozy backup services. For just around $5 bucks a month, Mozy offers unlimited off-site backup and the new version of the software allows you to specify an additional local site to back up to. I have Mozy set up to back up both the RAW and the Production data to the off-site servers as well as additional external hard drives. The initial backup of your data will take some time depending on how much you have to backup and your bandwidth, but afterwords the backups take mere minutes to preform thanks to the magic of incremental backups. Essentially, once the initial backup is complete, Mozy will only transfer the changes made to your files. Mozy is set to run every few hours to make sure that I am only out a very small amount of data in case of a complete loss of everything in my home office. Even if you only have a small amount (or several hundred GB of data!) you should check them out.

Admittedly, this whole process takes a little while to get used to, and is, honestly, time -suck to put into practice. The benefits of having multiple copies of everything far out-weigh the time costs. And it is something that can be implemented on a lazy weekend, and for a much lower cost than a couple $3K servers running over 64 TERABYTES of storage. As much as I would love
to have that, I really can’t justify it right now. After-all, there are lenses still to buy, right!?

As always, there are different options for everyone and you need to explore until you find what is right for both you and your workflow. What works for me, may not for you. I hope this helps anyone that stumbles across it, and if you have any suggestions – toss em in the comments below!

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DRG – [stray-random]