Youve finally gotten the bug and invested in a most excellent digital camera. Youre making the transition from wet film photography to the wild and wooly world of digital photography. Being a pragmatic person, youre all photographic career youve taken seriously the daunting task of filing images/slides. Now that youve taken on the digital world with both hands, youre asking yourself how do others archive their files?

Good question. Ill describe how I save and archive each of my digital files from their first entry into my computer system until the last CD is burned. First, you probably need to understand what Im trying to accomplish here. First and foremost I need a redundant system. This means if a catastrophic failure happens somewhere, I have the ability to recover from the disaster. Second, I need access to files for everyday processing. Third, the system has to be easy enough that anyone can follow simple directions to make this whole thing work.

Im not going to get into the whole file naming convention thing. Thats an article all by itself and Ive written my own views on that here. Im only going to talk about what I do to archive my images.

To meet the needs of my three main requirements, I need to do a couple of things. If you have any experience with hard drives, know you cant depend on them forever. Unlike many, Ive never suffered a total hard drive failure. Despite owning dozens of hard drives over the last 20 years, Ive never suffered a complete failure of any of my drives. Still, I pretend its a real threat and plan accordingly. All this means is I have to have my files copied to several different locations. Not only that, I need to have my files on different types of media for long term viability. In my case, I use a combination of several hard drives and CDs to backup my files. Eventuallyprobably before the end of the yearIll replace CDs with DVDs. In my case, I primarily use three different hard drives and the CDs.

To make my files assessable, one of my hard drives is designated as the working drive. That just means the other drives are only backups of the working drive and therefore only used and interacted with when copying is happening. I never write to/from the backup drives. The idea here is Im trying to limit exposureing these backups to potential issues that may cause a hard drive crash. Instead I routinely work of one hard drive. When and if that drive ever failed, Id simply have to buy another and restore it from the backups. I look at my backup drives as insurance and only need to work with them when an event occurs.

To make things simple, I flowed out my archiving from the initial download from the CF/Microdrive from my camera to the final backup. The basic structure starts from CD sized volumes640mbs. Okay CDs are actually larger but 640 mbs has always worked for me and has never failed. If you havent guessed already, Im a big believer in staying with a something that works even if it isnt the most perfect, efficient thing. I'll say this as long as my system keeps working.

You can see in figure 1 all the volumes in my desktop system. A total of nine partitions split among six physical drives. Theyre split as follows:

Hooker general computer system hard drive with the main system software 20gigs
Keiko backup computer system partition with the copy of the main system software 73gigs
CD Burns David, Heather, & Jim CD sized partitions 640mb
+Kirsten working archive hard drive with all digital files 200gigs
+Robin backup working archive hard drive, mirror of +Kirsten 200gigs
Vicki backup hard drive 60gigs
Aiko portable hard drive 30gigs