If there is one thing I’ve learned as a designer for nearly 10 years it’s to SAVE everything. a lot of work has been eliminated through the years because I have been able to go back and quickly put my hands on a certain file, font or stock photo that was previously used for a project.

Unfortunately, you probably already know that SAVING EVERYTHING can take a lot of time and space. This week a fellow designer and colleague asked about my file practices. I realized this is an area where we can certainly all learn from each other as we share our methods and increase our effeciency.

So, here’s what I do:

My file structure is first broken down into clients. Sometimes by their names or their company names.Inside those ‘client’ folders, I break each client down by projects.

Such as:

Business Card

Bookmark

CD Covers

Website
Now, within each of those “project” folders, I include folders for all the parts of the projects:

Such as:

Concepts
Stock Photos
Fonts
Final
Revisions

As I mentioned, so many times, this has saved me being able to go back and pull some random part from a project quickly. Depending on the size and scope of the project, sometimes within that structure I’ll also have to break it down into layered files and flattened files, so I may also have a directory for JPEGs, PSD, INDD etc. Just depending on the program used and project specifics.

That’s me and how I handle my files. What about you?

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Wow. This time yesterday I was in the middle of an extentsial melt down. I had restarted my machine only to realize in the process of my furiously fast workflow I had inadvertently dragged my desktop and profile files to an invisible folder. Thus when my machined logged in I was met with what appeared to be a fresh installation of Leopard X.

To say I freaked may be putting it mildly. The good news however, is that I’ve been using Mozy Unlimited for quite some time now and have all my files automatically backed up with them. As simply as checking my account online and ordering my back up disks, I had a full backup of over 100 GBs of work being sent to my home. If you haven’t invested in a good backup solution I would suggest you do so before you get that gut wrenching feeling of re-doing your work and disappointing your clients.

Good BackUp Solutions:

• A third party solution like MOZY Unlimited–they are easy to use, incremental backups and reliable.
• Back up to an external Hard Drive. For a Mac you can use Time Machine or Carbon Copy to make this a breeze.

Bad BackUp Solutions:

• Burning to a CD or DVD —the shelf life on these is too small and too unpredictable. Not to mention the fact that you would have to spend ALL your time backing up and very little actually working!
• Uploading to an SFTP site —the server load and time constraints are much to heavy for most web servers and hosts out there and again, all your processing time would go to backing up your files!

We all enjoy what we do, but having to do it OVER again is no fun. Don’t despair! There is hope! Backing up regularly and reliably will keep you from having to go through the pain of rebuilding!

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Crazy enough, after I had experienced a personal harddrive crash, the ministry I work for lost our entire design server. All of our files were gone in an instant. Naturally we sent the disk to a recovery specialist. In the meantime, I was able to access some files that I had done on my personal machine and backed up to MOZY. Recovering those files were SOOOOO easy. I simply logged into my account, clicked a few buttons and had my files back.

Mozy is truly an awesome service. Since then I’ve actually got over 20 GBs of files and projects backed up through them and when I do something stupid (like saving over an important file!) it’s a breeze to go and simply download what I’m looking for.

I’ve included a link below for you to be able to check them out. Enjoy!

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Yep. It’s true. No matter how secure you feel your system is, chances are sooner or later, you will experience a hardware failure. I know. it recently happened to me. I had been using my laptop for nearly a year. It was the home of innumberable projects, client records and pertinent information.

Then it happened. I was sitting in a software training and my computer froze. I had been using Photoshop at the time, so I simply restarted the machine. My Adobe install had been giving me problems, so I thought it was nothing more than a software bug. Unfortunately, the machine never came back on. NEVER. At all. It was dead. No warning, no sirens, no blinking lights, just a dead Mac.

I thought I was safe. I thought I had everything "backed up." I had been intermittently copying my files to my ftp server. What I didn’t know was that the majority of those files had never fully transferred. So the folders were visible, but empty. I was devestated. A year of work had just been lost in a matter of minutes. The experts told me it would take hundreds or thousands of dollars to restore my files. I had no way to fund that so I had to retrieve my files the old fashioned way (I’ll give you tips on this later!)

The good news is that this experience hooked me up with a real viable solution for online backup that is actually AFFORDABLE and automatic! It really is as easy as it sounds! Mozy provides automatic backup services. Depending how much room you need they are free or have a small monthly fee.

Seriously! You will never regret it! I’ve actually since had the need to recover some files from their system. . . I’ll talk about that more in another post. It’s a breeze!

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