Picture: Red Ivy leaves in fall on wall of Garry Farrar vineyards, Russian River Valley, Sonoma County, California.
This is an image I shot a year or so ago, and is now one of 4500 image scans in my production queue. I’ve been having lots of fun (sarcasm) this week, dealing with one of my back-up drives going on the fritz. I couldn’t imagine how I’d feel if all 4500 images went poof! It would be like watching 6 months of work vanish in an instant. A reminder… Always, Always, Always Back Up your data and photos.
You’ll also be seeing this as an image in an upcoming new web gallery. Stay tuned for more.
Your not the only one playing Russian Roulette. Half of my images are only backed up on a DVD / CD or two. The ones that are double backed up are on CD / External HD. I hate technology.
Besides backing up my photos digitally to multiple hard drives, as an extra safety measure, I’ll make two 4×6 prints of my preliminary keepers on my dedicated 4×6 dye-sub photo printer (and store one copy in a shoebox, the other in a photo album). And then for my best shots that I would like to enlarge, I’ll make an 8×10 or 8×12 print (after fine-tuning the image in Photoshop) and keep that print in another photo album.
Except when I’m adding prints to the shoeboxes or photo albums, I keep the photo shoeboxes and the 8×12 photo albums stored in an offsite storage locker. That way if any of my hard drives go dead (or are stolen), I will have at least a 4×6 or 8×12 print that can be easily scanned by a flatbed scanner (today or in the future).