Hey everyone,

At first (mostly last year), I thought my workflow was pretty solid and I allowed for ample backups. Now this year, as things get busier, and after learning from last year, I have made some changes and wanted to know your opinion on these steps:

Burn all .CR2 to disc immediately.
Import RAW and convert to DNG in Lightroom upon import.
Backup DNG to 2nd offline drive once in Lightroom.
Backup DNG to 3rd offline drive that is offsite.

Work on culling photos down to a working 500 (approximately).
Do Lightroom adjustments to treat photos so they look 'proper'.
Export these to JPEG in folder on Desktop "Doe, John & Stacy Wedding"
Do adjustments to each photo to prepare for proofing on online cart.

NOW HERE IS MY QUESTION! At this point, once the lightroom 'adjustments' are made and all the photos are fixed at the RAW level, would it be best to export these as a catalog and burn this to disc or backup to another drive? That way in the future, I can reimport the edited photos and have all my adjustments handy, instead of reverting back to the original RAW .CR2 disc and starting the whole culling/editing process over again....

This seems pretty common sense, but I just wanted anyone else's take on it!

Hey David

Personally I think you're overbacking up. I can count the times I've had to go back and get a file on one hand so to commit that amount of time and energy to it for every event seems like overkill.

Thanks David,

Can I inquire about how you go about your backup procedure? As well, do you use any RAW workflow apps such as Lightroom or Aperture?

Download images to computer.

Backup to 2 drives.

Edit images & export them.

Backup edited images to 2 drives.

That's all I do.

Mirrored RAID arrays are the way to go. Looks like one hard disk but has the redundancy of two.

Though true a RAID1 (mirror) is a great solution. A RAID "IS NOT" a backup solution.

A RAID is for data redundancy and/or is a data availability solution. Media should be backed up to another source. Off-Site being the best.

I use a RAID1 in my personal solution (for redundancy), the data is in turn rsynced every night to another location. A RAID will not help you in the chance you accidentally delete a file, as it will be gone from the drives.

Check out the new Drobo... backup twice in just one step.

And don't forget that you can back up in Lightroom to a second drive while importing the files.

I backup to my laptop on the go. When I get to the studio I put them on the main drive that has an automatic mirror. Once a month or so I do an offsite backup of that main backup drive. My shoots are archives in two places now.

I upload the whole shoot to my Jungle Disk (cheap online storage) For the sake of cost I only leave it on the remote disk until the session is edited, and the final disk out. It's an off site insurance policy that makes me feel great.

Gavin (or anyone who knows), can you tell me what the difference is or the relationship is between Jungle Disk and the S3 service? Is Jungle Disk just a user friendly software interface for S3?

Thanks!