When we shot film, the million dollar question was, "Where do I put my archive of original film, so that it is at the least risk of being destroyed or lost by fire, theft, vandalism or a tornado?"
With the age of digital photography, we have the luxury of being able to make infinite perfect copies of our original digital files. With our current workflow, I can sleep at night knowing that if a fire or tornado struck that we could be up-and-running the next day without having lost any images or other digital assets.
It is a lot to manage, when our studio produces approximately one-quarter of a million RAW images (among 4 photographers) in a year. That's about 2,475 gigabytes of data per year.
Here is an abridged version of our digital workflow, in terms of how the images are backed up. We always keep one rule in mind: we ALWAYS have more than one copy of an image, except for when they are on the original CF/SD cards. Secondly, we always keep shot cards in secure pockets in our clothing during a shoot, and never keep them in camera bags. (Camera bags are much more likely to be stolen.) I never let the cards out of my sight and start our workflow as soon as the shoot is over, and before I go to bed that night.
Here is what we do:
1. After the shoot, I download our cards using our laptop onto one of our four "ShootQueue" (
80GB Firewire 800 Firelite) Drives. We typically shoot 12-15 cards, for which I have 15 Lexar card readers that I plug into the computer simultaneously. The cards download overnight.
2. The next morning, I start burning a DVD set of the raw shoot. As soon as this is done, the DVDs are stored at Mark & Erin's house, so one backup of the shoot is off-site. It is then safe to reformat the cards.
3. The shoot is edited on the portable ShootQueue drive.
4. Once the edit is complete, we transfer the edited shoot to a server that is in our studio. The server has firewire 1000 gigabyte RAID hard drives. One copy of the shoot is permanently archived there.
5. The portable ShootQueue drive is taken to Mark & Erin's house and the edited shoot is copied onto another server we have there, with identical firewire drives, that are mirrors (exact duplicates) of the ones in the studio.
6. We burn a set of
MAM-A DVDs of the edited shoot.
7. Once a month all DVD copies (both the initial set of DVDs, plus the MAM-A DVDs) are transferred for permanent storage in an undisclosed location that is not in our studio or houses. (But I'm not telling you where, for security reasons :)
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Erin and I recently did a volunteer photo shoot for Flashes of Hope, a nonprofit organization that creates photographs of children fighting cancer and other life threatening diseases and provides these photographs to the families, free of charge. Its mission is to "help the children feel better about their changing appearance by celebrating it! And, for families of terminally ill children, the portrait preserves the beauty, grace and dignity of their child."
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