Archive, Archive, Archive
Wednesday 10 Jan 2007
Not enough can be said about the importance of archiving… For any one in any industry that involves the use of computers and sensitive data.
Personally, I look after hundreds of business logos, advertising pieces, databases, websites and photo assetts… not even including my own personal work. If I didn’t have an effecient way to archive my assets that allowed me quick and easy retrieval, I’d probably spend more time looking for art than actually working on the project. Or even worse, if a computer were to go down in my office, I’d be in a little more than a serious bind if I didn’t keep good backups.
There are several great ways to make sure you never permanently lose anything you’re working on, however it’s frighteningly suprising how few people actually implement some sort of archiving system. I can remember talking to a screen printer who called me regarding artwork I’d done for him about a year prior. One of his clients wanted an exact reprint of that job and he was having trouble finding the artwork. When I asked him how he kept track of past jobs, there was silence at the other end of the line. After probing a little further, I realized that my printer friend had no means of documenting what art went with each job, or any type of digital storage system.
Archiving is easy, and it’s like insurance. Sure it’s a pain to while you’re doing, it’s not much fun, but when (not if, when) something goes wrong, you’ll be covered and back in the driver’s seat in no time.
These systems can by complex, involving specialized software and dedicated computers and expensive media, or as simple burning your important info on a CD or DVD.
For my small home office, I employ a more simple set up involving an organized folder structure on my main computer, and external hard drive and a collection of CDs and DVDs. I keep a single folder for all my Studio’s Work in Process (WIP), one for all my financial data and one more for estimates. At the end of each month, I move all completed jobs from my WIP folder to another folder on my external hard drive, aptly named “Archives.” In this folder is a series of folders named by the date they were added. So at the end of this month, I’ll create a new folder in “Archives” named “January 2007,” and add the completed projects to it.
To add a level of redundancy to system, I then burn a copy of the new archive folder to CDs or DVDs, whichever is more appropriate, and label it according to its contents. That CD then gets cataloged in an neat little utility called DiskTracker, after which it lives on my desk until I need to retrieve any artwork from it.
DiskTracker is a simple cataloging system that keeps track of all files on a CD or DVD and allows quick searching for accurate and easy lookups. Simply open the volume you want to search (in my case, I organize my volumes by year - 2004, 2005, etc…) and do a search for whatever piece of art or information that I’m looking for. Once it locates the art, it tells me exactly which CD it’s on.
Simple, easy… essential for business. And all this setup cost me was the $30 for the software are $75 for an external hard drive! There are plenty of upgrade options from a system like this that include varying levels of automation, as well as multiple hard drive RAID configurations with mutliple levels of redunancy. If you have questions on implementing an archiving system for your business or organization, drop me a line. Can you really afford not to have some sort of archiving system in your business or organization?
chris | Office Productivity, Other Stuff
[…] Once you’ve got your image into the new document and positioned just way you’d like, save your image using the name “favicon.” SIDENOTE: Incremental saves are crucial to not having to repeatedly recreate work that’s been lost due to a software or system crash or some other catastrophic event that would cause you to lose your work. See our previous posts on autosaves and backups. […]