Original Art and Backups

A small accounting firm called one day because a hard drive crashed. The caller said that years of work had been lost and wanted to know if it could be recovered. Yes, we'd send it to a data recovery firm, they'd open the drive in a cleanroom and probably recover upwards of 95% of the data. It would be around $5,000.

And the moral of the story is that you should keep multiple backups of critical files, client work and original art. I recently had a whole directory damaged by a power outage. But I restored 7,500 files from backup, stress free!

Logos, banner ads, stationery and photos are edited and sized for specific applications. A photo that starts out at 30MB might be scaled down to 20kb for the web and then won't be suitable for printing at 300 dpi at 8.5" x 11". Logos or other files created in Illustrator may wind up in a specific size as a JPG or some other format. Not to mention that artwork can be extremely complicated with layers of text and graphics in the original Illustrator file that are easy to edit in Illustrator but later won't be easily edited as JPGs. It's best to keep the original vector art files so edits can be made later. Getting copies of the original art at the conclusion of a project is a good practice you should consider before working with designers. And then, keeping them organized and backed up is going to save time and money.