There are several advantages of using external drives:
1. None of your images are on your computer’s hard drive, so if something should happen to your CPU, you’d still have all your images accessible.
2. It frees up room on your computer’s hard drive, thus enabling it to run a bit faster.
3. All your images can actually be stored on separate external drives which you can arrange any way you like.
• Burn a disc for every single job you do. (Usually I burn two discs). That way you will have the images on your external drive as well as a backup copy or two on discs.
• These discs are then put in physical job envelopes and stored in a series of metal file cabinets that are organized by job number and date. You can also store these discs (DVDs usually) in a file box if you wish.
• I have a database, which I add to every time I shoot a new assignment, which is organized by client name, art director name, subject matter, shoot date and completion date. This way, I can search the database for subject and date, and it will return each job number containing that information. If it’s not on any of my externals, I can go right to the job envelope which will contain the backup disc. Naturally, I can also search my drive contents via the computer.
If you follow these steps, you should be able to locate any image you need in a matter of seconds or minutes.
Here is a sample of what my job envelopes look like:
This is a Hard Drive Tree structure: