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Well we’re now at the end of a seven day series of articles about my workflow. This missing piece is how I keep everything safe.

When I’m away from home I import photos directly into a new Lightroom catalogue on the laptop with me, when I get home again they are exported as a catalogue and ingested as a catalogue (don’t bother taking the previews, it’s overkill) into the iMac that sits on the desk at home. I don’t have a fancy drobo (there are about 400 reasons why – all with a £ sign in front of them) and instead I use a service called Mozy*. There are lots of other ways you can backup stuff, Brian Auer has an ongoing list of articles at EpicEdits (currently 15, Brian is there an index, can you comment with the link?)

This is a service that backs up whatever folder structure you want (or in the Mac’s case it can do it by type as well as in the image below) and keep it in “the cloud.” The main problem with it was the first initial 60GB upload which took about 2 weeks. Luckily it’s clever enough not to try and backup the same thing twice so I could stop and restart it as and when I needed bandwidth. The other problem I foresee is that if I move something here I thing it will back it up in a new location, rather than cross reference it from the original.

Mozy' Mac filetype dialog box

I’ve had to use Mozy once, when my giant corrupt Lightroom catalogue failed. I know now how to make this a lot easier to backup nightly by the way, but at the time I panicked for a day until I realised I had a version controlled daily (if necessary) backup of the catalogue. 30 minutes later it was back and in use :D

This technique isn’t full proof, if I lose the Mac I’ll be out for a few days (and I’ll be able to concentrate on why, rather than the data loss behind it) but at least the data is a lot safer then if there was no backup, or if someone took the local backup too when they stole the Mac.

A very nice man called Edmond Terakopian (portfolio | blog), who you might know from the 5D’II day and more likely from the photos from the London bombings EDIT: I added the wrong link. Updated! has an article about how he carries spare copies of software around with him on a keyring, maybe I should too.

That leaves us with one thing left, thank you for reading and don’t forget to take your camera out and set to looooong shutters, infinity focus and tiny aperture for the fireworks tonight. DPS has a great how to

Happy New Year everyone!

* Just so you’re aware, my bread and butter is knowing the ins and outs of the Documentum content management system, this is owned by EMC, a huge storage provider. I bought into mozy a few months before they were purchased as another subsidiary of EMC, they aren’t paying me (nor are EMC or Documentum actually) but just in case any one gets worried.