Hey guys, I wanted to post this here so everyone would see it. There is a thread on the forums about someone losing some digital work. I wanted to chime in because backing up your work in an organized way is extremely important. The first step to being a pro is thinking like one and there are strategies you can implement so you don't lose precious work and time.
There are two things you want in a digital backup strategy. The first is it needs to be automatic. No having to manually copy between drives, etc. It needs to work without you!
The second step is that it needs to be redundant and partially off site. That means that if one messes up, you need to have another set so you can recover. It needs to be off site because a theft or fire could ruin you. I've had students lose everything before because it was all in one spot.
The first thing I would implement if you don't have a system is an on site backup system that saves versions of your images. For that I use time machine on my mac and an external harddrive which saves everything hourly and saves different versions of it. I can go back in time and grab old versions quite easily.
For the off site backup, I use dropbox pro. It saves my work in versions and saves it off site so if there is a fire or theft, I can recover easily.
I always give this lecture to my students and then tell them that any lost file due to bad backups (or no backups) will count as an F. No excuses. If you don't have these in place, make it a priority before doing anything else. I always say that the day you buy your computer is 1 day closer to it failing. It will fail. You can count on that. All of them fail at some point.
When building my backup strategy, I asked myself "How much work and time am I comfortable losing in the event of a disaster?"It's a great question and that's how I built my current set up. I am comfortable losing up to an hour of work and that is the max I could lose. I've had to completely restore my work from backup (all of it!) four times with hard drive failures. The downtime I had was a couple of hours setting up a new system. No work lost, no custom brushes lost, no settings lost.
Let me know if you have any questions about this stuff. : )
Cheers,
Lee