Best Business Practices for Photographers [201]
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Backing Up Your Work in Progress
In addition to keeping two backups of every digital file I create (as I will outline in a moment)—one that I keep onsite and one that I keep offsite—I also keep a backup of my working drive. I have one computer in the office that I dedicate to doing post-production. That computer has two internal drives, one of which contains the operating system and all the applications. The second one is what I refer to as the Working Drive. Keeping a single physical drive dedicated to your data benefits you in two ways. One, you're not causing severe fragmentation of your drive as you save, open, close, save, delete, and then save other files, nor are you taking up scratch disk space from applications such as Photoshop. Second, in the event that your machine does fail, you can simply remove the Working Drive hard drive, put it into a secondary machine, and continue working. That drive is backed up to an external drive every night, so that should it fail, not only will I have a backup of the work, but I'll also have a backup of all the work that I've done to the file since I ingested it into the computer.
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THE 12 STEPS OF PHOTO ARCHIVERS ANONYMOUS
Admit that you have a problem and are not backing up images.
Understand that you do not know how to best resolve your problem.
Agree to establish a system that works specifically for your workflow.
Review the size and scope of your current archive and know what you're dealing with.
Contact/research friends/colleagues/services who might be able to help.
Choose whose system you'll use and acquire the equipment, then schedule a time to begin the problem solving and archiving.
Document your workflow so if you forget, you can refer back to your own diagram and thoughts.
Get your drives up and running and test them (nightly backups and so on) before beginning the full organization.
Start with your new system from the first day of a month forward and begin the move to your new system, verifying each copy to ensure they're properly copying. (An application such as Synchronize! Pro X will do this just fine.)
Locate and integrate stray image folders into your image archiving system, updating and fine tuning your own workflow documentation as you use it to be more clear and concise.
Review and research ways to tweak your system to improve it based on your own specific needs as you better learn how it works.
Spread the gospel of proper image archiving and pay forward your knowledge, because it is only through the teaching of a system that you begin to truly understand how it works and how you can continue to improve on its functionality and clarity. Continue to practice the gospel of proper image archiving.
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I put together a set of PDFs from the variety of talks I've done. It illustrates graphically my entire workflow, from ingestion to final archiving. You can access this set of PDFs at ftp://best-business-practices.com/harrington_archive_system.zip.
Further, as images are ingested into my Working Drive, they are simultaneously being ingested into a second location—a drive I have labeled Redundancy Drive. That drive's purpose is solely to be available should the Working Drive fail before the images make it to the image archive drives outlined in a moment or are archived that night. The Working Drive contains newly ingested files and those that have not been worked on, works in progress (such as a conversion from CR2 to DNG, full-rez JPEGs, deliverable files, and so on), images that have been delivered to the client but not stored on the Image Archive 00x drive, and lastly, my most recent assignments, which have been stored on the Image Archive 00x drive. This way, when I switch to a new pair of drives at the end of a second month, I still have the last 10 to 20 assignments available "live" on my Working Drive. The nightly archive of the Working Drive is intended to ensure the security and integrity of my post-production work, not to ensure