Photoshop Tip: File Management and Backup

PHOTOSHOP TIP: File Management and Backup - Part One
By Rich Seiling

WARNING! Your Hard Drive is going to FAIL!

If your hard drive failed today, what would you lose? Would you lose your favorite photographs? How about every digital camera photo you’ve ever taken? Maybe your family photographs, or your e-mail? How long would it take you to rework all the photo files you’ve created? Hours? Days? Weeks?!?

In switching to a digital workflow, this may be one of the most important questions you can ask yourself, because sooner or later, hard drives die. Are you prepared for that moment?

If you aren’t, there are few options. There are companies that can recover hard drives, but you will be looking at a $500+ bill, and no guarantees. It’s better to be prepared than to take a gamble.

Before you go out and buy a faster computer or a new digital camera, you should consider spending your money on a backup system first. What is a backup system? A backup system is an insurance policy for your photographs and other digital data that ensures you will always have your files, despite media failures.

Contrary to popular wisdom, a copy of your hard drive is not sufficient. What we need from a backup system is multiple duplicate copies, at least one of which is stored off-site in a disaster proof safe. It’s also very advantageous to be able to go back in time. A simple copy of your hard drive only lets you go back in time to the date the copy was made. Every time you make a new copy, you reset the clock, and if you need to go back further than that, you are out of luck.

Backing up also needs to be easy to do. If it’s difficult, you will be less likely to do it, making your safety net weaker. Cost is another important consideration. If it’s too expensive, you may not make complete or regular backups, leaving more vulnerability.

There is no one perfect solution to backups, and the greater your need for safety, the higher your cost. It is possible, however, to minimize most of your risk for very little money.

DISCLAIMER! It is your responsibility to educate yourself, maintain your backup system, and make decisions that fit your unique needs. By continuing past this disclaimer, you agree to take full responsibility for your backup. The author makes no claim as to the suitability of suggestions herein for the reader’s backup needs. The author assumes no liability for any reader’s files. With that out of the way, let’s get started.

The first step is to get your files in a state where they can be backed up.

The best place for the original copies of all of your files is on hard drives. Internal hard drives are cheap, ranging from $0.45-$0.65 per GB on sale (my first 1 GB drive cost $1,000!). It’s also easy to add more storage to your Mac or PC using external Firewire or USB drives.

The reason we want all of our original files on hard drives is so they are easily accessible to the backup software. It’s also nice to have them easily accessible to you, as well. How you organize the files is up to you--as long as they are on the hard drive, and you know where to find them, you’ll be ok. The original files on your hard drive should be working files, or files that you work on and change, whereas your backup files will only be duplicates of these files.

Once your files are organized in a backup-ready state, we can start to look at how to back them up.

The first thing we’ll need is backup software. Backup software gives us many powerful tools to use in our backup strategy including: incremental backup, read/write verification, restoration, file search, and backup file cataloging.

Let’s look at some of these features.

Incremental Backup
Incremental backup is a great feature. It allows you to backup up only the files that have changed since your last backup. This means that instead of having to backup up all 50-100 GB of your files, you can backup just the 1-2 GB that has changed. This feature saves time, and by using less backup media, saves money. It also preserves old copies of files so if you wanted a copy of a file as it was on 1/1/04, you can go back and retrieve that version.

Read/Write Verification
Read/write verification is very important. After data has been written to the backup, read/write verification compares the two to make sure they match. This helps ensure against a variety of errors that can happen when copying data. Read/write verification cannot guard against problems that arise when the original data is corrupt, but if you have a stable system without viruses, the occurrence of corruption should be rare.

Restore
Backup software stores files in a proprietary format. You can’t just insert a DVD made with Retrospect Backup software and expect to read it. That’s where the restore function comes in. Besides being a necessity, it allows you to choose specific files from specific dates to backup, and provides a way to access the organizational structure of the backup.

Search
Just like any other computerized search, the search feature makes it easier to find the files you need to restore.

Cataloging
This keeps track of all the files that have been backed up. It lets the software know which files have changed and need to be backed up, and it lets you find files that need to be restored.

There are many brands of backup software and types of backup media available. In the next installment of this series, we’ll continue on this subject and move closer to our goal of putting a backup system in place.