I shoot a lot of photos for our office. I cover most of our events, video shoots, stills for our TV specials, and location and studio portraits. Although most of these photos are used on a one-time basis like for our website, www.cbnasia.org or our newsletters, I still need to keep them for our file and reference. Our organization is a Family of Ministries. It is like a holding company. We have sister organizations that I also shoot for, Operation Blessing Foundation, our humanitarian arm (www.obphil.com) and Asian Center for Missions, our missionary training arm (www.acmnet.org).I shoot for all of them too!
My backup solution is almost like the same that I have for my personal backup. As you will see in the photo. I have five external hard drives with their respective labels. Yes two of them dont have labels but I’m just getting to stick them. I just keep forgetting. 😎
Shown are the external hard drives that I use to backup all of the images I shoot for our family of ministries. I use Seagate Hard Drives and CD-R King SATA enclosures
Anyway, the top drive is a 1Tb Seagate where I store almost all of the images I shot for CBN Asia. The second drive is a 400Gb Seagate for my Macbook Pro’s Time Machine backup. When I get to the office this is the external HD that is quickly connected to the laptop and backs it up every hour as long as it is connected.
The third one is a separate 250Gb Seagate used to store all of Operation Blessing’s images which is filled to capacity right now. I’d be upgrading this to a bigger hard drive when time and money allows.
The fourth drive is for the images of our missionary training arm, Asian Center for Missions. Their current image inventory is not that huge yet as I just deal mainly with portraits and a few events. I also use a 250Gb drive here.
The fifth one is a spare 400Gb hard drive that I am thinking of using to replace the second hard drive I described above.
In my backpack is another 1Tb drive that I bring along to my house as a sort of off site backup. There is also a Western Digital My Passport HD that I use to download and backup images on the field.
Well there you have it. This is what I use at out office. It is important to note that image backup should be done immediately after downloading to the laptop. I usually reformat my memory cards after I download them, and would really be a nightmare if I download and not backup and then a crash happens. I can only cringe at the thought of losing precious images.
