Backup…Backup…

[fluidedge]

Hear hear.

All our work is kept centrally on a 120g external Firewire Drive hooked up to the server. Then regularly archived to DVD.

The drive cost us about £100 off ebay last year and has been superb. With it being external you can hook it up to any computer within seconds if the original computer dies or crashes, and you can even take it home at night or lock it in a safe for belt and braces security.

Simple rule is to keep 2 copies of everything as even DVD’s and CD’s are not bulletproof.

The latest operating systems have lots of features in them for backups and archiving, we tend to set ours to do that kind of stuff in the early hours of the morning when even we are unlikely to be working. That way it doesn’t seem like such a chore.

[Bill Dewison]

Sorry to hear that Lee 🙁 It always happens when you haven’t made a backup for a while, its like the “I Told You So” curse or something!

Humble opinion, but for the cost of CD-Rs, its not worth NOT backing up. For the cost of a meat and potato pie (sorry potato and meat 😉 ) you can save your work every couple of days. Sure, I know you’re not filling the full CD, you may only be filling 1% of it, but in the scale of things can you afford to lose that job you just worked on?

I’ve found exactly as Lee has illustrated. You don’t backup for a week or two, thinking “I’ll do it tomorrow” and the saying Tomorrow never comes just bites you in the ass. We’ve all done it. Working as a g.d. this was even more so. You’d be working on a complex image, save it regularly (just as important as backing up) and then you just leave it sat on your hard drive for a month while you decide whether or not you can be bothered with the five minutes and 69p it takes to back it up!

As Chris has said, its also important to backup all your CDs. DVD technology is far ahead of me atm, but as far as CDs go, get yourself a 5 year old son who likes to use them as frisbees! You’ll soon make multiple copies. I try my best to make 2 copies of everything, keep one in a safe location (in my case, at least 3ft above the floor), then another in a totally different building (I’m paranoid that one of my relatives will become a pyromaniac 😉 ) and then finally the copy I’m using. Legally it is your right to back up your software as long as you don’t sell the backup t someone. One other point, try and get Microsoft to send you a replacement for your damaged Windows 98se. Its impossible!!

Cheers, Dewi

[Paul Goodwin]

Dewi use a CR/RW and u dont loos e the rest of the disk, just use it like a floppy until it’s full, ok they are a few pence more but u can keep on using them , once it’s full transfer it all onto a normal cd then wipe it clean and start again

[Liam Caulfield]

Or you can just burn a session instead of burning a whole disc with 2Mb of info.

[Nigel Fraser]

I have a removable hard drive in each of my machines, onto which I have copied a “drive image” of the whole operating system and all the programs. Then I do incremental backups each week of the “new and changed” files that I have been working on.
This way I hope to be able to restore the whole system and settings very quickly and also not loose too much day to day stuff in the event of a major problem.
I learnt from a very bad experience about 5 years ago, similar to Lee – lost everything I had done in the previous 3 years 😥 with no backups inbetween – I was gutted, so don’t take a chance – GET IT SORTED before it’s too late.

As a side issue, there is of course the security thing too, where it’s all too common place for PC’s,Macs and anything that looks semi-valuable to disapear in the dead of the night aswell.

Nigel

[Paulsad]

And just another thing – keep your backups in a location other than near your computer – I had a break-in and they took the bloody lot – 5 years work files – backups and all.
Paul

[Aitor Asencor]

Now I always get the new computers with two hard drives.

One of the disk is only used for incremental backs ups.

And from time to time backed up to two DAT.

I always backed up to DAT but if the disk crash you always loose stuff.
A second HD is indispensable.

Aitor

[Bill Dewison]

I too have the 2 hard drive setup. 2 x 30gig hard drives, partitioned into 4 drives, giving me a separate work area for each element of my business (okay, so the 4th one is for games, but you know what I mean 😉 )

I’ve tried the CD-RW route and to be honest, it just bugs me. All that writing/rewriting and then if that one disk goes pear shaped (which we all know can happen when a 5yr old is running round) all my work is gone anyway. I tried the 2x CDRW, a backup with a backup, but I still prefer just copying a selection of folders directly to a CDR and storing it in a safe locale.

And yes, I have a HUGE collection of backup CD’s, but I find it an effective library style system. I also keep all my old driver file disks, all useful magazine cover disks and a backup of any work I have sent to a newspaper/magazine or any other company. Its wasteful as I’m sure I have more plastic than half of Taiwan, but I know I’ve always got what I need at hand. After saying that, today I was short of an Epson 1290 driver and I had to ring the local computer shop for a swift copy service (No telephone line or internet at the shop yet 🙁 ) The annoying thing is, I had the CD somewhere at home 😕 Silly Dewi!!

Cheers, Dewi

[Phill Fenton]

My directory structure for storing customer files is as follows:-

Clients – Subdivided into folders each year
i.e. 2004 , 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996

Each year is subdivided into months:-
i.e. Jan, Feb, Mar , April etc.

Each month is subdivided into clients folders:-
i.e. client a , client b, client c, clientd etc.

Each month I start a new folder and within that folder create folders for each and every client I do any work for that month. Once a week I copy the current months folder (with all of it’s subdirectories) onto my laptop. It only take a few minutes via a network cable). This way I always have all my work saved on a seperate computer and stored away from my place of work.

I can easily trace all customers artwork by cross referencing it with my accounts package by looking up the date on my accounts when previous work was carried out. This way I can always locate the artwork for any particular job ever carried out. I have been using this system for the last 7.5 years and can locate a customers artwork in seconds this way.

I also have everything backed up and up to date (within a week) should the worst happen.

I find this system works well for me – is quick and easy to back up (without having to back up the entire hard drive) and allows me to locate all of the work I have done for any client quite easily.

What systems do others use for saving customer files and ensuring they can be found easily?

[John Childs]

Sounds a bit complicated for my purposes Phill. Because of the nature of my clientele, and the type of work we do, we don’t need anything so intricate. Client files that I digitised twelve years ago are still current and in daily use today and we want it all in one place.

Basically, we have a folder for each client which contains every job we have ever done for them. If somebody changes their livery we put a new folder inside their existing one and call it “livery Aug 97 to Apr 03” or something like that which gives us easy and accurate access for accident damage repair to an old van but leaves all the current stuff in the top level of their folder for everyday use on new vehicles.

Some stuff we have done in the past we are not likely to repeat, maybe the customer has gone broke, so I put their folders onto a separate archive disc as there is not much point in continually backing up stuff for which we already have plenty of copies and are not likely to need again anyway. Nevertheless, this does sometimes pay off when an errant client comes back after many years.

I recently had a case of a company whose vans we used to do in the late eighties but lost because the company was taken over and the new owners had a policy of putting engineers into unmarked estate cars. Ten years later their policy was reversed and they approched me for a quote to do some vans. This was purely coincidental because the people we used to deal with had all left and the new people had no idea that we used to do their work. They were most impressed when I was able to pull out all their old files and do a mock up in about five minutes. I think it also helped win us the contract as the new people were inexperienced in buying van graphics and were worried about quality but they realised that as we had done work for them satisfactorily in the past then we were likely to get it right again.

We back up to CD. Being purely Illustrator outlines the files are not large and I can cram everything on to a couple of CDs. It would be a different story with big image files.

Again, because of the nature of our work, we are not producing new stuff every day so constant back-up is not required. If I lost a months work it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

[Aitor Asencor]

Folders for every client and backed up to DAT a client folder when is big enough. Then created a new empty folder for that client.

We use Retrospect to find any work in seconds.

In mac, date are part of the info of the archive, so you can search in retrospect by item name, folder, dates….

Aitor

[Nigel Fraser]

Glad you mentioned software Aitor, I spent years trying to find a really nice simple backup program that I was happy and confident using.
Used to use a program called Seagate Backup Exec but it didn’t support CDRW and later when I got more huge digital print files it started to cause me problems.
I was given a copy of Retrospect but it just confused the hell out of me and I ditched it i’m affraid. Guess it’s ok if you know your stuff more than me !
After some research I found this site http://www.handybackup.com/ where you can buy and download a trial/full version for only $30. It seems an ideal little program to me – just thought I’d share that in case its a help to anyone else 😀

Nigel

[Nicola McIntosh]

i’m with john on this one! not got enough time to do what you do phil!!

mines is dead easy at the end of every day i print out job sheets with the swatch of vinyl attatched to it and copy artwork to a floppy!! yes have thousands of them and had them for years!! when the customer returns i can look up the company name very quick!! copy to cd-r now and again!!

Nik 😛

[Phill Fenton]

Perhaps you’re right Nik? Maybe I should buy a great big filing cabinet 😀

[John Singh]

Yep! This happened to me Lee, last week the computer froze, couldn’t boot up or owt’

My techi friend had to wipe the drive clean but he saved the data first

Thing is we save data to disc which is fine but its the recent data or the current jobs you’re working on that you get caught out on if you don’t save regularly.

As mentioned the discs don’t really cost that much compared to the hell of losing data.

So BACK UP, BACK UP

John

[Mike Grant]

I think I have a fairly foolproof system in place, but like everything you have to keep on top of it.

First we have jobsheets and each has its own number.
One is filed numericaly and one is filled alphabeticaly.
When a job is created on the computer it is saved with this number. (No names at all)
The job is IMMEDIATELY backed up to a zip disk. I LEARNT THE HARD WAY BELIEVE YOU ME!
I then print the job using a template I set up myself to print the design on the actual order sheets, so if everything does get lost I at least have a scale visual.
If I have to buy in materials and I am asked for an order number I quote the same job number so that everything can be backtracked to the order.
Then at the end of the month I database EVERY JOB into a simple alphabetical order, including DATE, JOB NUMBER and a BRIEF DESCRIPTION of the wording on the sign.

This system works well as I can find any job going back the last 7 years since I started this system in a matter of seconds. No fumbling through thick files for me!

Even if you forget the customers name all you need is a key word ie. CHURCH for example and all the different church names come up to narrow down the searching from there you pick out the job number and go strait to the required file.

I also carry around a bag of files of everything. Once a Zip disc is full I copy it to another disk that is kept in the house, but carry the original as a just in case. I think the backing up to zip disks is better than a CD as the saying goes “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”
All the Zip disks are labled from Job# to Job# and saved in a file accordingly, so this breaks the long listing of numbers down into smaller packets that can quickly be found

Foolproof in my humble opinion. 😀

Sorry to ramble and go off topic a bit but I thought this would help all those newbies and maybe some wrinklies as well! 😎

Try it you’ll like it!

[Nigel Fraser]

Wow Mike that does sound pretty foolproof – I wish I had the time to organise & implement such a complex system ! But I know even if I did that during the day to day rush it would end up slipping into disorganised chaos pretty soon 😥
I guess I’ll just stick with my simple hard drive/CD backups and a filing cabinet full of job sheets in alphabetical order.

Thanks for sharing how to be REALLY secure and efficient Mike,

Nigel

[Mike Grant]

Thanks Nigel, I am the sort of person that has the rule “A place for everything and everything in its place” I hate it when I go into the workshop on the weekend to do a job and cant find anything (hot) because my boys just drop things where they lie. Then I have to phone them to find it again. And because of that I have my own toolbox in work that the boys don’t touch and if they do I know strait away as they put stuff back in the wrong compartments 🙄
Don’t you just wish that your staff would follow your example.

I talk to the walls too and get a better reaction outa them 😆