From the 2008 programme
Finally we'll cover backup and archiving—the consistently misunderstood and under-practiced part of digital photography that can jeopardize your entire photographic archive if not done correctly.
What it still teaches
The programme called backup "consistently misunderstood and under-practiced" and put it last in the day. It is still the session most people need and fewest act on.
In 2008 the options were external drives, DVDs and, for the careful, a second drive kept somewhere else. The rule from that era still holds: three copies, on two kinds of media, one off site. Cloud storage makes the off-site copy easy, but a sync service isn't a backup. If a file is deleted or corrupted locally, the sync copies the damage.
A sound setup today
- A working drive, backed up automatically every day.
- A second local copy on a separate drive.
- An off-site copy, either a cloud backup that keeps old versions or a drive that lives at another address.
- A test restore once a year. A backup nobody has restored is an assumption.
Aperture itself became an archiving lesson. The application doesn't run on macOS Catalina or later, so photographers with years of work inside a library had to migrate it to Photos, Lightroom Classic or Capture One. Formats and applications end. Plain files with their metadata outlast them.