[Off-topic] Item on how to not lose your digital files

By Mike Green on 11 May, 2011

I intend this blog to be largely about the ‘art’ of photography. Musings on specific images and on places where images can be made both definitely fit into my vision of what I would like to write about here, as do responses to other photographers’ thoughts. Occasionally, I may write something about photographic kit, though only in the context of using it. One thing that I didn’t intend to write about was mundane things such as how to avoid losing captured images, in a technical, backing up the data sense.

That said, a couple of friends asked me to tell them what I do to protect my image files from loss, since they know I have a fairly considered backup strategy. Given the difficulty of remembering all the points to make verbally, I wrote it all down. It may be helpful to anyone who’s never, either metaphorically or literally, sat down and properly worked out where the risks of image loss are in their overall workflow, so I thought I’d post it. It’s not going in as a ‘proper’ blog item though – I don’t want to pollute my overall theme with nasty, technical things! – I’m putting it in as a page linked from the home page of my blog / journal.

This is not a prescriptive ‘how to’ article; it’s more to do with thinking about what you maybe should be doing to mitigate those risks which are important to you, with some comment on, in general terms, the ‘how to’ aspect. The key phrase there is ‘important to you’, to which I would add ‘and which apply to you’; everyone has different requirements and there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution. Anyway, I’m at risk of rewriting the thing again here, so this is a link to the article and there should be a link in the header too. I hope a few people find this useful – at worst, it’s a handy reminder for me!