Backups and archiving are hardly the sexiest subjects in the world as we have said before. However if you have ever lost data then you will know how important it is to have a proper backup plan in place. Patrick Southern shares his thoughts and strategies for making sure nothing gets lost.

Backing up projects can be expensive, but it is not as expensive as having to hire a data recovery company. It is too late to think about backups after you've lost something. You've probably read the forum posts online asking how to recover data from a broken drive, it never ends well.

You will also probably outgrow your fast RAID storage that is connected to your computer. How do you go about archiving old projects so that you can reversion work from clients years after the first master was delivered? (And thus make more money)

Step in Patrick Southern who has put together a very handy guide to data backup and archiving. He might work for a storage company, but he does go through the different options for backups and long-term archiving.

So please take his advice. Three copies of the data, in two different places and only work from one.