I’ve been a photographer for a very long time now. I started shooting seriously when I was 18 years old (that was 34 years ago), then working as a photographers assistant for 7 years and finally turning professional and shooting for myself 22 years ago. So, I’ve always been interested in preserving my work. However, that used to involve buying archival film sleeves and the like. Not anymore. Since I started shooting digital way back in 1999 it introduced a whole new set of rules and problems on how to backup and archive my work.
This is a guide to how I currently do things (backup and archive wise). I don’t claim that it’s perfect or that it suits everyone. It’s also not a cheap solution. However, it is fairly solid (fingers crossed). That’s the important thing for me. Feel free to take bits from it that you feel may suit your own set-up. Much of my current set-up was founded on principles spoken about in The DAM book by Peter Krogh. Written back in 2005. The principles in that book are solid and logical.
I’m a working professional wedding photographer. Not only do I need to backup my work, I also need a system that can cope with a system failure. That means getting up and running again as quickly as possible from a drive crash, computer crash, house burning down etc.
I’ll try and break things down into stages to clarify each part and the reasons I have them set up this way. I’m Mac based, so apologies if I talk about things that are Mac specific. I’m sure the PC world has equivalents. Most things should apply to any OS to be honest.