You'll have to forgive the very "flowchart" feel to the image above but I wanted to demonstrate how I do my best to keep images safe from every shoot that I do.
1) The very first copy of the image is going to exist on the memory card inside the camera. I have a ton of these things and they don't get cleared off until a job is completely processed, posted, and delivered.
2) The first thing I do when I get home from photographing anything (no matter how late it is) is to download the images on the cards to the computer. So now we have accomplished our goal right? The images now exist in 2 places so we are all done right? WRONG.
3) Connected to my computer is a sizable external hard drive that is set-up to mirror the hard drive on my computer. So as soon as I copy images from the cards to the computer that hard drive kicks on and start to copy the new image files from the computer to the external hard drive. (so now the images exist in 3 places)
4) Usually within a week of downloading the pictures I'll will have picked out the best images. I'll process, edit, and correct them and then they are ready to be uploaded for online viewing and ordering. I use Pictage as my print fulfillment and online previewing partner. My favorite thing about Pictage is that they keep high resolution copies of all my files on their servers indefinitely, this means that I if a freak hurricane strikes East Mesa, and my computer, memory cards, and external hard drive all get washed away I can still recover my images from Pictage as an offsite backup.
Thanks for reading. I hope this post has shown how important keeping images safe is to me and my business. Check back tomorrow for posts of the shoots I did in Pinetop last weekend.
