Friends: at your request we’ve loaded up a re-watch of last week’s episode of chasejarvisLIVE to my YouTube channel [subscribe here] for your review and perusal. If you’re at all interested in our digital photo & video workflow and backup, then this is worth your time. It’s a follow-up to our popular workflow video and post where we discussed and reviewed our entire digital strategy from capture through to delivery of final files to the client…even how we backup our daily work, our email preferences, and our music. You name it. The gear, the plans, the whole mess.
I’ve said it before, but it would be remiss not to mention it again: I think this topic is one of the most important fundamentals–not just for professional photographers and filmmakers like us–but for anyone with valuable digital content that’s worth backing up. In this episode, Scott, Dartanyon, Erik and yours truly took live questions from a worldwide twitter audience and addressed in depth earlier questions that we received from our recent post–about everything the basics of our strategy to the subtle and the scalable parts that make this worthwhile to almost anyone.
We’ll keep an eye out for the comment section below for this post and do our best to answer any other topics/questions we may have missed. Surely there’s plenty.
Question to Chase and Team and also other users… Do you add keywords when Importing?
I use Aperture and don’t really have the need for keywords as yet but I wonder what’s the pro’s/con’s?
Hi guys,
Very insightful. Thanks for taking the time to do this. From what I’ve read, RAID creates redundancy and not true backup. By that I mean that if someone hooks up their RAID unit to a virus infected desktop, then the RAID unit will also be infected. RAID also doesn’t protect from data corruption. So, my question is. How do I create a true backup and how do I prevent a RAID unit from being infected by a virus if my desktop computer is infected?
@Jonathan: I haven’t had any experience with Drobo but I’ve read quite a few horror stories about Drobo on forums. The nail in the coffin for me was the experience that photographer Drew Gardner had with Drobo. He had to return 4 Drobo Pro units and lost valuable data. For me that’s an unacceptable failure rate and I would not trust Drobo with my data.
Love this and agree that this was more of a data integrity than photographic work flow, but still great information. Love the Chase Live, blogs, Best Camera iPhone app (just updated, yay!). I’m definitely a fan. I keep active files on the laptop with backups on DVD and portable hdd, plus cloud backup.
Since you mentioned cloud backup services, I wanted to plug the company I use (no affiliation). Backblaze (www.backblaze.com) is only $5 per month for unlimited backups from one computer. I like the fact that there is nothing to configure – they just back up your entire system. You can retrieve individual files or they can send you a hard drive. Fortunately I haven’t had to use them. Unfortunately, I found them after I suffered a catastrophic hdd failure and data recovery quotes are coming back at four figures! I certainly learned my lesson, if not a little too late.
You should check out their blog post on how they built their own rack storage “pods” that you can buy – 67TB for less than $8G.They also released the plans open source so you can build one yourself.
Why don’t you use a Drobo from Data Robotics to backup your photos and videos? I think that you guys would benefit from it tremendously.
May be a stupid question, but how do you transfer large size video files off to your external harddrive? I have a multi-GB video that I’m trying to transfer, but it seems to be too large of a file…