Photo Backup Routines

I have not yet set up Aperture Vault specifically, but what I do instead is run a backup of everything in the "home" folder each day on an external LaCie firewire drive. As far as photographic images are concerned, when I have a CF card with images to be downloaded, I first download them into my Pictures folder, and then I download them again, this time into Aperture, so that I've got them in two separate places on the hard drive. I haven't yet burned any of those to DVD but I know I should start doing this as an additional protection for my digital images.

I have purchased a second external drive but haven't set that one up yet, and it will be specifically for my photographic images only. This is what I used to do with my PC and it worked out pretty well. With Aperture's Vault system, I think that I'll be able to protect and preserve my images even more effectively.

I'm still doing mine manually, and brute force:

I have an external FW hard drive (with removable trays) that I'll just create a new folder on (today's date), then do a "drag and drop" of my entire DOCS/PHOTO/etc (data) folders onto it. Since I have the luxury of plenty of HD space, I don't have to be particularly efficient about it.

I have three of these HD trays, each with a 250GB drive in it, which I rotate through to minimize a single point of failure. And because its contiguous space, I can just do this before bed time one night and it does it all unattended overnight.


-hh

I burn DVD's when I have enough pictures to fill up the HD, then I take that iPhoto library and back it up in its entirety to my external HD. Then I start a new iPhoto library on my computer.

I only have a 40 GB HD in my laptop which fills up quickly so this works well for me.

My current plan is to get a couple 250gb HDD's to augment my 120gb that I currently store my Pictures folder on. Do a simple drag and drop of my Pictures folder to them on the first go round. After that one HDD will go to my sisters house (I see her every couple of weeks), and will then get rotated out for updating with the other one.

right now I have two methods:


1. manually Copy all my RAW images to my external Firewire 800 HD
2. do the Aperture Vault backup to my iPod HD (they are all JPEGs in Aperture so they fit fine; they are JPEGs because Aperture won't support RAW images from my camera )

I also burn DVDs of the RAW files every time I hit increments of 4GB in my photo folder

1. Always burn a DVD when the CF card hits the desktop. ALWAYS. Do not pass go, do not collect $200 before this is done.

2. Import.

3. Back up Aperture Vault.

4. Back up Back up each week.

1) Import from CF card

2) Sort through (using Lightroom) 'ditching' my poor ones.

3) Put into my file system under "Originals" in the shoot name folder.

4) Put the shoot name folder (with the originals folder in it) onto my external

5) Wipe CF card

6) edit from the copies on my HD

iGary said:

1. Always burn a DVD when the CF card hits the desktop. ALWAYS. Do not pass go, do not collect $200 before this is done.

2. Import.

3. Back up Aperture Vault.

4. Back up Back up each week.

Click to expand...

But keeping an off-site back-up seems to be missing. For your work that would seem to be a biggie.

This might be kind of lame, but in addition to saving copies of every photo to an external hard drive, I upload some of my favorites to my flickr account.

mac_head101 said:

This might be kind of lame, but in addition to saving copies of every photo to an external hard drive, I upload some of my favorites to my flickr account.

Click to expand...

Not too crazy. I put my favorites on my Epson P-2000 that I tend to carry everywhere.

I pretty peeved about aperture's vault thing...

They assume if I want to have manually referenced files, that I can just get on and back them up too.

True, but I'd like Aperture to do it for me. Doesn't seem like too much of a leap...

So I have my entire library on one external drive. Backed up into a vault on the other drive, which also means I have to drag a copy of all the photos there, as appropriate. Also keep lots of 1/2-res copies on Flickr...

Mmmmm flickrrrr....

Import CF to Photomechanic

PM dumps to 2 external drives.I rename in PM. I shoot exclusively RAW.

Import Images into aperture library,which goes onto on of the externals and then vaulted into the 2nd external.

I use the simple method of making a ZIP archive of my Pictures folder and then burning that to a DVD.

Caitlyn said:

I use the simple method of making a ZIP archive of my Pictures folder and then burning that to a DVD.

Click to expand...

how much does that save space? do you compress it via terminal by using tar?