So, after I’m done a session I immediately export my files from my camera and burn them to disks that get labelled and stored in a box. This gives me all my RAW, untouched images in case something major ever happens to any of my drives. Currently, I’m looking into renting a safety deposit box to store these in (to get them offsite from my home office) or purchasing a fireproof box so that I can keep them at home but be assured that they won’t be destroyed if there’s a catastrophe at my house. Most likely I’ll go with the fire safe since I’ll be more likely to remember to use it then having to deposit disks with the bank!

Once this is done I keep all my working images on an external hard drive. There’s a new working images drive for each year. These drives also get backed up to a 1 TB external drive once a week during the year they’re used and as needed for older drives.

There is a system out there called Drobo (www.drobo.com) that does an amazing job at backing up things…it’s not cheap, but from what I’ve heard gives people a lot of peace of mind about the safety of their files.

Also, a word of caution about using online backup sites. A few sites like this for photographers went under last year at this time. A lot of people were scrambling to retrieve their very large and very important files from the company’s servers before the plug was pulled on it, this overloaded the system and slowed the entire system down. Some people lost their stuff. If you’re going to use these online backup sites make sure it’s not the only backup you’re doing of your files/harddrives so that if the company goes under you’re not up a creek.