Digital photographs are great, until you lose them.

Most people don't think too much about the archiving issues involved with digital photography. They go out, take pictures, and save them to their computer. And that's great. But how do you avoid accidentally erasing an important picture? What do you do if your laptop gets stolen, or your hard drive fails? And what if you take so many pictures that you'd fill your hard drive up in a week anyways? How do you keep track of them if you shoot tens of thousands but need to be able to find them in a snap for someone?

There is no one solution, but here's how I deal with my images:

File naming: It's very important that filenames are unique and make sense. If you call a picture "mike.jpg" and then take another picture of Mike a week later, then one might accidentally overwrite the other. My filenames follow the following convention: "YYYYMMDDX_title_seqn" - where "YYYYMMDD" is the date the images were taken, "X" is a single letter for chronological sequencing, "title" is a short keyword pertaining to the event or series, and "seqn" is a sequential number. If you ask me "we need that picture you took of Mike last summer" it'll be tough to track down. But if you say "we need 20030612b_mike_0043" then it's easy to find.

Backups: Having multiple copies of your data is critical, whether you're talking about digital photographs or any other files. If you haven't backed up recently, ask yourself "how screwed would I be if my hard drive ground to a halt right this minute, and was unrecoverable?" The ideal backups will be in multiple formats and multiple locations (having your backups right next to each other won't do you much good in the event of a fire!) - I'm currently backing up my data to duplicate DVDs and mirrored hard drives. I've just invested in a tape backup drive and am going to keep a set of tapes in a safe deposit box at the bank.

Click here to see the workflow involved.