Chase Jarvis is a professional photographer focusing on commercial print and video assignments. Recently, he took the time to create a video that describes step-by-step his process for storing and archiving images. It’s worth the 10 minutes to watch.

Three important points Chase makes are:

• Keep a clean copy of your original images. The moment you’re finished shooting, create a backup. These are your original RAW or JPG images. Never change them.

• Make redundant backups. The time to make your first backup is while you’re copying images off the cards. Depending on a single hard drive at any point in your workflow is a recipe for disaster. Hard drives will fail (trust me, it eventually happens to everyone).

• Keep your backups separate. A backup drive next to a PC is only slightly better than no backup at all. You should have 2 duplicate backup drives, with one stored away from your studio.

While most of us cannot afford to duplicate Chase’s collection of top-of-the-line servers and hard drives, any backup and storage solution should cover all the major points he makes. A quick glance over at Amazon shows top-rated 2 terabyte external drives going for $129, so you cannot afford NOT to make backups.

Update

Here’s a collection of videos from several world-famous photographers showing their workflows.

Tags: business

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