Photographer Chase Jarvis – Workflow and Backup system

Chase Jarvis is an amazing commercial photographer who shares his digital photography workflow from start to finish in this video. With digital photography your backup and workflow are really an essential part of your work and even if you just take pictures part time having a good solid backup system is essential. I myself am very over cautious with my images and have backups of backups of backups. While having a storage system as extensive as Chase’s system won’t be needed for most people there are still some good points to learn here:

1) He saves, backups and does a quick edit at the end of the day. Everything is still fresh in your mind and if anything is missing or off you will notice right away. This is something that I do with weddings, even if I get done at 11:00pm I still like to download the images to my laptop and peek at them to make sure I have everything.

2) Keep a clean copy of the original data (RAW files or whatever format you shoot should always be kept in its original format)

3) Off site backup is key. Even after he does his first backup in the hotel room, 2 drives have the data and they are separated into 2 different rooms. If a meteor does take out the entire hotel you are pretty hosed but in most cases that would serve as a good backup.

These concepts can really be scales down into any size no matter how much (or little) you shoot. I have a similar backup plan although no X-Serve servers over here, I use a ReadyNas NV+ with 4 drives in it that I love!
You can check out a review of that drive I did awhile back here: Backup Drives for Photography.
(Amazon link here, right now they have these units without disks on sale for $300 which is a great deal: NETGEAR ReadyNAS NV+ 4-Bay 0TB (Diskless)
)

Let me know what kind of backup system you use in the comments or any questions.

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