Seven Deadly Sins Wine

I like wine, who doesn’t and I’m loving this series of wine label designs from Spanish design agency Sidecar Publicidad. From the red laced bottle for Lust to the gold bottle for Envy creates a striking range of wines.

Greed

Lust

Gluttony

Back-Up Start Planning

Two years ago I had the nightmare of an external hard disk fail. This particular hard disk was used to backup work. The realisation that everything you’ve done over the past few years had gone was horrendous - talk about a sinking feeling in your stomach!

What made it worse was not only personal work had gone but clients work too. Luckily I had made DVD copies of everything but it made me realise how much of our trust is placed in the hard disks that are either external or within the computers we use daily.

Graphic designer and musician Scott Hansen said: “It’s easy to forget that as computer-based creatives, everything we’ve ever done, all of our intellectual property, is sitting in a little metal box and there are a lot of things that can go wrong with that box.”

So this made me look at how we backup in the studio and how important it is.

Being Organized - All of the work is filed within a folder structure.This ensures that folders or files are easy to navigate, locate or save. Each file name is recognizable either by using the client or project name. I avoid using names such as NEW LETTERHEAD or BROCHURE a011210. 

Local Backup Drives - As we are a Mac based studio, we use Time Machine to do hourly backups which goes to a 1TB Time Capsule disk. For archived work this is stored on another 1TB external drive which is then mirrored to a further 1TB drive. The reason for this is if the external drive was to fail we still have copies of the work.

Off-site backup drive - Archived work is also mirrored to another drive which is kept off-site. This is brought into the studio once a week then taken away for safe keeping. So if anything was to happen to both studio drives, I haven’t lost all of my life’s work!

I’ve looked at using cloud storage, but have found for large amounts of data and with low broadband speeds this isn’t practical hopefully improvements will be made in the future. However certain files/data are kept in the cloud but these are relatively small in size.

When it comes down to it regular backups are a must and off-site backup is strongly recommended. This may not be foolproof but it works for us and we are constantly reviewing what’s best for our backup and storage needs. 

However at present knowing that data is stored on two drives as well as off-site means that having an ‘almost’ disaster of two years ago should be a thing of the past.