Should I back up my work? Of course!!!!! No matter if you are just shooting for fun and capturing your family in there everyday life or shooting daily sessions as a professional backing up your data is an essential part of a good digital area computer plan.
The Story:
Just last week my backup plan consisted of saving shoots to my hard drive in my computer as well as making a backup copy to an external portable hard drive. This plan was fine, not exactly what I should be doing when I am shooting 3 or more sessions a week, however it was providing 2 separate areas for my data to be stored. I came to a point last week where my internal hard drive was full and I was unable to put any more images on it so I was storing everything directly to my external drive. I had ordered a new external drive which was in the mail. In the time before my drive came in I had shot 5 sessions and they were only on my external hard drive. I dropped the hard drive on carpet and it was rendered useless, the drive would no longer spin, and when I could get it to spin and actually access data the files were corrupt. Nightmare is what that is. I had to call these people and tell them that I lost their session! I mean I am supposed to be a professional and I lost sessions, this is a serious problem.
How did I fix it:
I rescheduled all my shoots that were lost, at no charge of course, and for a shoot that had hired models that were originally paid for by the client, I brought them back and paid them myself. I made every attempt to ensure that I am still going to have a good working relationship with my customers, because despite my mistake, they need to know that i am learning from my mistakes and that I am taking additional measures to correct my errors.
What I use now:
My backup strategy now starts by immediately copying my data from my digital media cards onto my laptop hard drive which I then make a duplicate copy of the raw data onto a portable external drive. So when I leave my shoot I have 3 raw copies of the data, on three separate sources. When I arrive home I proceed to make to make copies of the raw data on to two other desktop external hard drives. Once this copying is complete I will clear my media cards. I do all my editing to the files on my local hard drive, due to faster access to the data. As I progress through the raw files I then and export as JPG I continue to backup the JPGS to my internal drive as well as my portable external. Once all editing for the session is complete I make copies to my 2 desktop externals and I upload to my proofing site, leaving raw data in 2 separate locations and proofed pictures to 3 different areas. I then delete the sessions from the internal drive and portable external.
Conclusion:
This all seems excessive and redundant, however redundancy is what it is all about. The more copies the better.
