Backup Minimalism

Fig. 1: My life's work all in one place

I have my images backed up in the form of dozens of CDs (mostly obsolete) and on a portable HD. But today I'm quite taken by the fact that I have all 150 of my keepers backed up on a single DVD. I could also put all my writing, computer code, html, and guitar compositions on the same DVD ... and still have room to spare. That means my whole life's work weighs a few grams and could be slipped into a coat pocket ... very depressing! ;)

Here's how I do that. Let's say I have an image that started life as a 35mm neg and was then scanned at 14bit x 4000 ppi. That's a 120 MB file. With layers and channels in PS but dumbed down to 8-bit for printing, that still typically between 100 and 250 MBs. Even my dSLR edits average perhaps 75 MB.

What I do, however, is make a copy of each edit file, flatten it, add any adjustments I need for a specific printer + ink + paper combo and save that with a file name that tells me what printer, profile, and paper to use. This means that any time I need to re-print an image I don't need to do a series of test prints to get everything just right again. But on top of that I don't save these print masters as PSD or TIFF but as JPEG level 12. I've yet to see any degradation in an image from 8-bit uncompressed to JPEG level 12; but the file size averages at 24 MB compared to 37 MB for a flattened PSD.

These printer-ready files are perfect for last-resort CD/DVD backups. Assuming they've reached their final edit, should it ever come to pass that I have no other copy of an image, I can still do what I need to do with the file - print and make on-line jpegs.