(Warning: this is not a post with a lot of cool photos and fun ideas – it’s a post about tedious work that you should be doing to save your own butt.  So don’t expect fun.  Not this time.  Sorry.)

If there’s an aspect of photography that photogs hate most, it’s probably archiving.  It’s the photographic equivilent of doing your taxes; endless and mind-numbingly boring.

It’s also a vital necessity.

When I talk about archiving, I’m really talking about two separate but interwoven tasks: making a backup file and updating the catalogue.  The catalogue actually comes first, since a backup isn’t very useful if it doesn’t backup the catalogue as well as the images in it.   I use IDImager Lite software for my catalogue.  It has the features I need, is very customizable, and best of all it’s free.

My workflow goes something like this: download images from camera, sort in Adobe Bridge, edit selections in CS3, save as TIFFs on computer.  (If the shoot was important, I keep the original RAW files; if it was just a fun shoot for myself, I often delete the RAWs and only keep the edited TIFFs).   Once a month I transfer all the edited TIFFs off the computer to the external drive.  When they’re in place I use IDImager Lite to assign keywords, which tags them for searching.

Once in the catalogue, I then made additional backup DVDs.  Project complete.   A backup file is necessary.  The question is not IF your hard drive will fail, it’s WHEN your hard drive will fail.  Sooner or later all drives crash – the trick is to have your data in another place so that you can get back up and running as quickly as possible, with a minimum loss.  As for the method of back up, that’s a more personal choice.  Storage memory is very cheap and always getting cheaper.   Personally, I use an external hard drive as my primary storage.  It’s cost effective and easy to access and maintain.  And while it sits next to my computer, it only ever runs when I’m transferring files to or from it, which I try to do once a month.

MULTIPLE backups are necessary.  My external drive won’t do me much good if it fails and dumps all my photos.  I strongly advise you to find a separate site for your secondary backup; if a pipe bursts and your house floods, your second external drive is still toast if it’s sitting next to the primary and the computer.  Instead of a second drive, I use DVDs as a secondary backup.  I burn two copies of each disk; one that remains with me and one that gets stored at a relative’s house.  And while the jury is out regarding the sustainability of DVDs as a medium, I don’t have much fear that they’re going to turn to dust in their box, so I’m comfortable using them.  Frankly, they’re impractical to use for anything other than a complete restore of my library – unless my drive crashes and dumps all my files, the DVDs will never get used, which is fine by me.

Don’t kid yourself, this is a time-consuming task.  Depending on how much I’ve shot and how far off my monthly schedule I am, the process can take anywhere from an hour to four hours (part of that time is spent burning DVDs, which means I can be doing other things at the same time).  I dread it, I put it off more than I should, and when I finally sit down to do it, I’m rarely smiling.  The return comes when you need a specific file and you’re able to fire up the external drive, open the catalogue software, and find the image you want in seconds.  It beats the hell out of sorting through folders by hand, trying to remember the date and location of the batch you want!  

If you don’t have a system in place already, do it now.  Today.  Do not let it pile up any longer, because it only gets worse, and you put more files at risk.  During my time as a university photographer, one of my projects was updating their archive, which their previous staff had never done.  Every photo taken since the university went digital was on their server; it was my job to load them all into the catalogue software, make sure they had captions if at all possible, assign categories and keywords, and assign standardized file names.  There were nearly 250,000 images.  It took 5 months.

Trust me, you don’t want to spend that much time getting your own files in order.  Start now, before it grows out of control.  A quick web search will turn up a wide range of catalogue software, some free, some expensive.  Identify the features you need and read the reviews.  As for backup, a trip to Staples will solve that problem for a couple hundred dollars.    Believe me, it’s worth the price to know that your images are safe!