In the very early days of our studio we lost some extremely important project files. We had been working on the project for about a year and one day the project folder disappeared. I frantically scoured the trash bin, scanned the hard drive, purchased data recovery software, and even sent the drive out to a company that specializes in data recovery. But, the data was never recovered and to this day I have no idea what happened to it. A very important and costly lesson ($10,000) was learned that day—if you want to stay in business, backing up is vitally important in this digital age.

Today, we have a multilayered backup strategy that is employed through out the studio. While a project is active we create a folder in Dropbox organized by client and project. We purchased the 50gb account and that one account is synchronized across all our computers in the office. Hands down it is some of the best money we have spent. Our dropbox setup has a few advantages. First, all of our active projects are constantly synced across all computers, so we always have access to the most recent versions of files. Two, because they are synced across all the computers there is hardly ever a need to transfer a file to someone else in studio because everyone has a local copy of the active projects. Three, Dropbox has built in subversioning of files. If you make a mistake and need to roll something back, simply login and roll the file back. Four, you can share project folders with clients. Sharing this way is nicer than giving client’s ftp information or having them burn a dvd. The other main tool we use for active projects is Git. Git is a distributed version control system. We use this for app development, but are considering using it for web development as well. I will spare you the geeky technical details but here is a link to the advantages of git over some version control software. To make things a little less geeky and more approachable to the average user we use a program called Tower, which provides a nice gui interface when interacting with repositories, so you don’t have to do everything command line. Finally each computer has an external hard drive attached and performs an automated backup each day using SuperDuper. Dropbox, Tower, and SuperDuper are all awesome tools and well worth the money…go get them.

Once a project is closed, we archive the job folder onto our Drobo, which is attached to a mac mini. The folks at Drobo refer to their products as “storage robots”. Its basically a box of hard drives—like a raid, but way smarter. The mac mini acts as our server for the office, which hosts our git repositories and backups our files. The Drobo is our central archive for past jobs and assets. One of the beauties of Drobo is that as our storage needs expand, we can simply replace a hard drive with a larger one. Backing up your files on site is great, but unless you also have offsite backups your data is not really safe. If you only have onsite backups and you have a fire, your data is hosed and all your data will have been melted into a little shiny puddle. We use Backblaze to handle our offsite backups. Its constantly running in the background and takes all the data on our drobo and backs it up to their servers in the cloud. There are a number of backup products like Mozy and Carbonite, but Backblaze offers the best value in terms of pricing, so they our vote.

Thats our backup strategy at the moment, but as new products and technologies come our strategy will continue to evolve. It really doesn’t matter what tools you use, just make sure you backing up your data. It needs to be automated and it needs to be in multiple locations. Save yourself a costly lesson and learn from our mistakes. I would love to get some feedback—do you have any backup tools that you like? Do you have any horror stories of losing data? Post a comment.