Now that it’s the new year and we are all excited about the possibilities that the year will bring, one must not forget about last years photos. A few years ago I learned a tough lesson about not keeping current backups of my images and many great photos are gone forever after a failed hard drive. Today I am setting aside the day to go through my important images and make sure I have good backups. Since losing a drive, I am a bit more paranoid about my data and have multiple copies archived in many places.

All my images go into Aperture 2.0, which allows me to catalog, tag and maintain a central location for all photos. I use both a Macbook Pro and a iMac, so some images may be on one or the other, depending on if I download on location or not. The first thing I do after tagging all my images and throwing out the bad ones, is to export to an external drive. This way I have it in two places. Then I backup that external drive, onto another external drive and take it offsite. If anything gets stolen or I have a fire, then I still have piece of mind that my data is ok. Thirdly, I then burn a DVD for each individual shoot. This can be a real pain in Aperture, because one must first export, then create a burn folder, drag all images to burn folder and then burn the DVD. Plus, if you have too many images, you need to remove some, so the DVD does not give you an error. This can be a real pain, especially when trying to archive a weeks worth of work.

Finally I read about a plugin by Blue Room Software, that allows you to burn directly from Aperture 2.0 and even allows you to span over multiple DVD’s. As I write this, it is running in the background, exporting and burning. It does take awhile, because it needs to export first, but it is all automatic and works fantastic. Just keep in mind, you need to have enough disk space to export your images.

You can see by the screen print below, it is configurable for labeling options as well, so you always know what is on the DVD.

Amazon has some great deals on external drives, like a 1 TB Iomega for less than $125. This would save you hours of headaches, not to mention losing images you will never be able to recover.