Protecting Your Digital AssetsTM
Beginning
Asset Management
Getting Started:
Back it up.
Make copies.
Backing Up Your Data
Data:
digital assets, photos, videos, music.
You made it and you need to keep it. Your livelihood depends on it.
Now
What
Protect yourself in case your computer crashes or disappears.If it’s not already, managing your data needs to become a habit. Yup, right there with flossing, exercise, walking the dog, and
billing clients. Whether it’s you or your assistant,
backup has to be integral
to your workflow.Creatures of Habit
How much data do you have today? Is it backed up? How long will it take you to find images from a shoot three years ago? How much data do you generate (per day, per week)? How many projects are you working on at the same time? How much of your archived project data do you want to keep online at once?
HEY.
You know it happens.Before randomly piling disk drives on your desk, allow us to give you some pointers. This is by no means the definitive guide to backing up data, but maybe you can
become more organized.
Data:
digital assets, photos, videos, music.
You made it and you need to keep it. Your livelihood depends on it.
Protect yourself in case your computer crashes or disappears.
Your data likely falls into a few categories: files you want handy or work in progress; an archive of completed projects; and
backups of both work in progress and your archive.
Data & Workflow
How safe is your data?
Of course, having a backup is a good start. Having another copy that you stash someplace else is the next step. Stuffed in the closet behind your dirty dry cleaning isn’t bad, but there may be better options. Think about other places you can keep a copy: a friend’s house, safe deposit box, your mom’s house (bring your laundry, too).Safe, Safer,
Safest
You’ll rest easier knowing
you can easily get your
hands on critical data.
What happens if your data is lost? Simply an inconvenience? Was it a good way to get rid of data clutter? There go a zillion edits of Fifi the fluffy pet poodle? Or is your client—and reputation— gone, too?
What’s this cloud thing about, anyway?
Well, our opinion is biased, but again it’s up to you. Check out the costs for the disk space you need up in the ether, the cost to upload data, and the cost (and time) to download and recover your data.
IS the
Sky the Limit
Do you care where your data is?
When it’s in the cloud it could literally be anywhere, and you may not know who has access to it.
Can you get your data when you need to? Even if you have a gargantuan-sized connection, when your hard drives crash, it’s still going to take way too long to recover all your data over the Internet and you’ll have clients waiting. You’ll find that like most creatives, the cloud isn’t such a great option.
Backing up both your works in progress and archive is an important step. Unless your passport and plane tickets are handy for a quick getaway.
Design a system that
allows room for growth.
How much disk space do you need today? In two years? This depends on how much data you generate. Think about how many images, how much footage, you shoot in a year.
BAM.
Beginning Asset
Management
Develop (remember film?) a system.
Adjust this basic outline to your workflow
:Create to your heart’s desire. Or your client’s budget. Or both.
Transfer your images and video to hard drive(s) or SSD via your computer.
Copy to a works-in-progress volume (back that up separately).
Transfer completed projects to an archive (and back that up separately).
1
2
You also need to think about the kinds of enclosures you need.
What’s an enclosure? you ask.
If you’re not familiar with disk drive design, take a look at what you think of as your disk drive sitting on your desk.If you need product
suggestions, we have a few
recommendations. The CRU
ToughTech series, as well
as the CRU RTX towers,
are popular since they offer
ways to easily expand your
collection of disk drives.
What you see is really what we in the trade call an enclosure. And inside that enclosure resides a bare disk drive. Most enclosures do not allow you to easily replace your disk drives. As you might
suspect by now, it’s a lot easier if you can keep one set of enclosures and swap disks as they fill up. Otherwise, you’ll end up with an untidy stack of disks and a web of cables.
This means that you are using a handful or more disks to back up to, each of them acting as a unique device. This gives you flexibility in determining how you store your data, but make sure you set up a routine to copy your files and data.
What
Should
You Do
Next?
Consider what type of backup
system you will need. Without
diving into too many details,
here are a few basic terms that
are used to talk about storage.
Just a Bunch of Disks
Disk mirroring automatically copies a set of files and data to another hard drive or to multiple hard drives. (Disk mirroring is also called RAID 1.)
This data storage approach helps prevent data loss if a hard drive fails, because all of your data is backed up to different drives. (For safety’s sake, ask us how to incorporate a third drive into your disk mirror setup.)
JBOD
RAID is a backup storage architecture that allows data to be
spread across different hard drives. There are different kinds
of RAID setups, each with its advantages. The different RAID configurations you want to consider depend on how many hard drives are in your RAID system and whether you want to
configure for speed or reliability.
Primary refers to the disks you keep in your house or office, and are readily available if you need to recover your data. You should also keep an offsite, or secondary, backup kept at another location. Think about a burst pipe, fire, or earthquake. Make sure you data is protected if disaster enters your life.
Redundant Array of
Independent Disks
RAID
There are also
Okay, Seriously.
Put Me to Work.
Pre-production
• Gather the equipment you’ll need for the project. Your camera(s), lenses, lighting, etc.
• Prepare the laptop you’re bringing with you, as well as a variety of memory cards for your camera. Make sure you’ve updated your software, have enough internal disk space available, and think about organizing your data before it’s created.
• Bring enough hard drives to hold the data generated by your shoot. These can be new ones (format them for your laptop OS before you leave home) or simply used ones with data erased (and, ahem, backed up).
Creating a digital asset
management system is
easier than it may seem.
Here’s a basic outline to
think about.
Production
• Make sure you budget time for data transfers and backup. You are about to generate the data that people pay you for. • During the shoot, download from your camera(s) to your
computer. Or shoot tethered to your computer, depending on the type of shoot.
• Organize your data before, during, and immediately after the shoot so nothing is lost.
• After the shoot, ensure all memory cards and equipment are downloaded.
• Back up all data from the shoot onto a separate hard drive, either by simply drag/drop copying or by using a backup utility.
Regardless of which backup strategy you employ, you need to do something, and the longer you wait to start, the more you are likely to lose when your drive fails.
You are probably doing a
lot of these steps already.
The key is to take it up a notch so you’re really covered.Just in case.
From here, you can make things more complicated and technical if you want. But this will give you a starting place.
Post-production
• Before editing, ensure your work is safely backed up and organized.
• Editing should be done on work drives that are not storing your backup data.
• After editing in the post-production phase, ensure both your raw and edited work is organized and safely backed up. • Whenever you have backups, you should keep copies in
different locations when possible.
Protecting Your Digital Assets
TMFor more information, visit the CRU web site.
www.cru-inc.com/photovideo sales@cru-inc.com
We hope you’ve found this booklet useful,
and we look forward to hearing from you.
Peter Krogh’s “The DAM Book” is also an excellent resource. The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers, Peter Krogh. www.thedambook.com
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