Craig Swanson, founder of CreativeTechs, a Seattle-based firm dedicated to providing technical support for design professionals, frequently speaks at the School of Visual Concepts. One of his most popular presentations is on the need for getting serious about backing up and archiving your computer’s hard drive. Here’s a brief recap of Craig’s talk, but you’ll find countless other useful tips for professionals who rely on their computers at CreativeTechs’ QuickTips site–an archive of free weekly emails the company offers for the asking.

What to do before your hard drive dies.

If you’re fortunate enough to be reading this before the hard drive on one of your team members’ computers crashes, you now have a choice to make: Do you want to be known for your colorful language and unfashionable armpit stains when (not “if”) said hard drive fails? Or would you rather be known for your cool demeanor and clever preparation when the bomb hits?

If you’re opting for Plan B, there are some relatively simple and inexpensive strategies that can keep you out of harm’s way:

Buy two external hard drives.
With multi-terabyte drives selling for a relatively few bucks, it’s not a bank-breaker to get a couple. You can then set up the free backup software that comes with most of them, or download some reputable backup shareware (CreativeTechs recommends either Retrospect or Deja Vu for simpler systems. Almost all software packages let you schedule daily backups and let you decide what kinds of files you want to back up.

The theory is to keep Drive A on-site for a week, and then swap it out with Drive B, which you’ll bring in from home or a fireproof vault. This way, when a computer drive goes toes up, you’ll have everything saved from the day before. And if your backup external hard drive does a swan dive, then you always have another with data no more than a week old.

Backing up is not archiving.
Once you’ve got your daily backups going, you still only have half of an emergency recovery plan in place. The other half is to start archiving jobs that are complete. You need to get them off of active workstations for a couple of reasons: They’re hogging up space, and you probably can’t find an old job when you need to get to it.

When you archive your projects, you store them on a more permanent medium, such as DVDs, labeling and cataloging them so you can easily locate your work in the future. There’s software—Extensis Portfolio, for one—that can help you keep track of your archives, and create web-based, searchable directories.

Oh yes. You’ll be making at least two copies of every archive disk, too—one for the office and another to safely store off-site.

Why bother?
You might think that a dead drive isn’t the end of the world. After all, you could probably cobble together old jobs by begging printers or rebuilding them from hard copies. The problem is, you’re never quite sure what, exactly, was lost until someone needs something. And here’s the cruelest blow of all: You know those irreplaceable digital family photos people inevitably store on their work computers? Well, they don’t call them irreplaceable for nothing.

Resources
CreativeTechs has published notes about backup and archive strategies that can help get you started. Take a look at their QuickTips Special Issue on Backup and Archiving, as well as notes from a 2005 talk on the subject.