photography workflow – back-up plans (update)

A previous article on Tangents, on the topic of photography workflow – back-up plans for your main computer, dealt with two ideas:

• safe-guarding yourself against catastrophic failure or loss of your computer
• preparing yourself for when your hard drive crashes.

I do think the ideas there are solid – making sure you’re not vulnerable to a single point of failure in your system. The comments from others supported this and also offered a lot more advice and other possibilities. With that, I slightly adapted what I was doing:

• my bootable clone hard drive is now a fire-proof & water-proof safe made by ioSafe
• Back-Blaze as an off-site / online duplication of my files
• Using the PackRat feature of Dropbox

With all this in place now, I think my back-up plans are very solid, especially with some extra redundancy thrown in there …

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photography workflow – back-up plans for the main computer

The photograph above was shot with my iPhone while I was waiting for a corporate photo shoot to commence. The sky over lower Manhattan was grim and rainy. You can see the reflection of the fluorescent lights inside the room. This gave the city scene a Blade-Runner-esque feel. And with that, this image is perhaps suitably Apocalyptic for this topic – what are your plans for catastrophic failure of your main computer?

The idea for this article comes from a discussion with another photographer – she cringed every time I mentioned, “so what happens to your business if your house burns down and your computer is gone?” My other remark that her computer’s hard drive most likely will fail at some point, didn’t seem to lift her spirits either.

So with that, let’s look at those two points:
1. Safe-guarding yourself against catastrophic loss of your computer.
2. Preparing yourself for when your hard drive crashes.

The solutions are fortunately quite simple and elegant …

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