In the field backup

[mikeojohnson]

In the most recent video journal Michael details his backup routines in various scenarios.

In the field with a laptop segment I would offer a suggestion.  The ingestion routine he uses is to import into Lightroom and simultaneously backup to a portable drive.  He then makes another copy in a device such as a Hyperdrive.

In order to reduce the impact of a hard drive failure in the laptop (which also renders the portable drive useless) I partition one of my portable drives into two partitions.  I then use a program called Super Duper to create a clone of my MacBook Pro laptop drive.  I still have plenty of gigs of storage in the second partition of the portable drive for images.  This way, should my laptop drive fail, I can boot from the external and continue to process.

Before I leave for a trip I update the clone on my OWC portable drive.

This adds one more layer of protection against a drive failure in the backup routine.
Mike

[jjj]

Simple but very useful idea. Though I seem to recall you cannot use target mode on the new Mac Laptops bar the 17" due to the lack of Firewire.

I always have two ext 2.5" HDs which I keep in sync. This also gives me the option of having data kept in two places. I don't tend to have the data on my laptop to keep it clean and tidy.