This could make or break you. For real.
As of late, I have had a lot of people asking me about backing up and my specific solution for handling data. Chase Jarvis recently did a live broadcast where he spoke on his workflow (outlined here) and the setup at my house is very similar in a scaled-down, DIY kind of way. A lot of this stuff I have learned from my own experience and many of the great photographers I have worked with.
The way my workflow goes is when I am on location, I set up a little spot (hopefully with power) that has my MacBook Pro and an external hard drive attached. I prefer either the G-Tech Firewire portable hard drives or the LaCie Rugged portable drives. The LaCies tend to run a little hotter just due to the design of the drive, but they do have that neat little bumper that goes around them (in multiple colors!) and little rubber feet inside the enclosure that will cushion the drive if it does succumb to gravity.
So I have my MBP set up with the drive and as I ingest images with Photo Mechanic, I set it up so it will copy the images from my card to the internal hard drive for the computer as well as the external drive. This way, I don’t have to remember to manually move the data from the internal to the external. Another thing I have ingrained in my brain (ingrained in the membrane?) is NEVER EVER FORMAT A CARD IN THE FIELD. Not only is that bad Juju, but it’s never a bad idea to have a whole other copy of your images. The cost of another five or ten camera cards is minuscule in comparison to the anguish (and possible lawsuit) losing all the images for a job would incur.
When I get home, it’s time to put everything in my various repositories of information. I have built a server out of an old iMac G4 that hides on a shelf in the corner of an unused spare bedroom. That consists of a 500GB internal hard drive, and two 1TB LaCie d2 Quadras. All of that is networked and shared with my laptop (wireless), my Power Mac G5 (ethernet) and MobileMe (I’ll get to that little gem in a second.)
My first step is to move everything from the laptop to the internal on the G4 server. All of this can be controlled from screen sharing in Leopard and Snow Leopard. I double check the data on the external drive to make sure everything is the same in the two copies of my images and then connect the external drive to my G5 desktop where I do the majority of my editing. After the laptop and external have moved the images to their respective destinations, I jump on the G5 and start a copy (through screen sharing) from the server to the two external hard drives connected to it. After that is started, I copy all the new images from the main hard drive in the desktop to the secondary internal drive. Now everything is in its proper place in the house and I can copy everything to another external drive that gets rotated out with another every week. These are stored offsite so if something catastrophic happens (flood, fire, theft) I have a full copy (minus a week or less) of all my images.
This is a very brief synopsis of how I do things. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to comment on this or email me at SamAllen.Photo@me.com
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