Technical Illustrators.org Forum

Just curious how everyone is backing and archiving their work. Personally, my laptop has two physical drives so I can save work on one. I also use a couple of Seagate 500 GB USB drives and port everything across every few days. I copy things back and forth having Windows take care of the merging and overwriting of files. Does anyone have any good software/hardware solutions for the PC format?

Back in my print days, the industry standard was Retrospect. http://www.retrospect.com/
Don't know how they hold up today, I imagine there are other players now. This was in the day of RAID and tape drives.

I have a system that works well for me.

I have a 2TB external expansion drive that I back up to every day, keeping 10 copies, the oldest replaced by newest. This runs through a USB3 cable so is pretty fast.

I also have an extra 2TB internal hard drive that I back up to every Sunday. I keep 7 copies, the oldest replaced by newest. This is very fast.

I actually tried many of the backup software packages out there and many seemed to be less than stellar (IMHO). I found a free software call DataSafe (http://www.sofgem.com/products/datasafe.html). It is old but it works very well. It is automatic (scheduled) so I don't have to give it much thought. I do check my log every morning to be sure that the backup size seems consistent with what it should be. Occasionally I flip through the backup to be sure it looks intact. I have seen no issues to date.

I do not compress my backups as I find if I need to grab a file from the day before I don't have any hoops to jump through. Just a matter of grabbing the file from the right folder on the right hard drive.

I used to back up only occasionally, but decided last year that this was not very smart since I have tons of client files with new ones created daily. In all my years I have never lost any data to a malfunctioning hard drive, but it is better to be safe than sorry. I have occasionally lost a file to a program crash, so it is nice to be able to go to my day before backups and grab the previous version.

There are some backup programs that will backup as you work, but I have never found a need for that and the one I tried seemed to use many resources that inhibited work in progress in the many resource intense programs I have running constantly, which might include a couple CAD programs, Photoshop, Illustrator, MS Word and other reference materials.

Hope this helps.

Backups should be automated, redundant and rotated off-site. Based on that criteria, my backup system isn't great at the moment...

I backup current projects to DropBox, and image my whole system to a 1TB FW800 external drive. DropBox provides automated, redundant off-site backups, but not all my files are included due to the 50GB limit. My external drive is neither automated, redundant nor off-site, but at least it protects me from hardware failure on my production computer.

I highly recommend DropBox though. You can revert a file you've accidentally saved over, share large files without uploading them to a separate service, and send & manage files from your phone when you're away from your desk. EDIT: If you're interested in DropBox, use my referral link! http://db.tt/AhBK8tAp