Dan Saelinger‘s studio almost burnt down, but it didn’t.  That is good news, though he is super excellent at backing his files up, so he wouldn’t have been totally burned (as it were). Are you good at backing up? Be better at it! I asked Dan exactly what his process is, to give us some inspiration.

He told me:

I have a working drive for jobs and for personal work, projects in process remain on those drives until finalized.

Finalized jobs and projects are then placed onto to a 8 terabyte Drobo (kind of a mini raid system, basically makes redundant data backup across a couple drives so if a drive fails or data isn’t lost). This is my main archive that stays in the studio. Any and all photographic work goes on here including contest entries, portfolio and art prints, web images, blog images etc.

I then copy the data to a second Drobo that is an exact mirror of the studio archive. This one lives at my apartment in Brooklyn.

And for extra security at the end of the year I back up all of that year’s work onto a single drive, normally a terabyte or two and hide it in my old bedroom at my parents house.

That’s basically it. Though I’m very interested in cloud computing backups, my feeling is data rates aren’t fast enough for the sheer amount of stuff I need to back up. Though I do keep a copy of my portfolio files an my Mac mobileme account.

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Thanks, Dan! We’re glad you and your pictures are safe. Cause this looks like it was nasty.

Here is some Electric Six because they sing about fire and high voltage and kissing. Enjoy.