Following a few recent site visits and frantic phone calls, I identified a new form of amnesia effecting the creative community. Unlike the familiar syndrome where a person is struck on the noggin and forgets his or her past -- a plot device that has carried countless "B" movies and soap operas -- this new memory loss affects our perception of the present.

Specifically, the amnesia removes any concern for the survival of critical data, such as the files open on your desktop while you're surfing to see what's new here. Or better, the project at hand with a deadline in the next few hours or day. Could you recover this project in time, or at all, if something bad happened to the file? If your hard drive or system crashed? Right now, not later today or tomorrow. In the next few minutes.

If you are the always-prepared scout, then please feel smug. In the more likely case that you have no backup strategy and no way to reclaim lost work, then you suffer this amnesia syndrome. You may take some small solace in knowing you're not alone: One designer admitted he's recently put more cash and effort in storing his digital audio files than securing the work that puts bread on his table.

Branded
I suggest that minding the data integrity of current projects is an essential element of personal branding. What holds a customer to your business is more than great design and ideas. Customers care about their entire relationship with you and your firm, including their perception of your reliability, the archiving of completed projects, and your ability to meet or exceed their often-unreasonable deadlines. Clients care little if your system crashed or their project files were corrupted because of a rolling blackout, or that you lost all the e-mail messages holding the details of a project. What they want is the whole job done. Now. And done right, without any worries. Anything else is bad for your business.

Confidence in your brand, moreover, can anchor current customers and bring in referrals. The strength of your brand is critical in today's tough market. According to some reports, major content sites project this year's advertising revenues to fall 10 to 20 percent lower than last year's. To lose a client for some reason outside your control is part of business; to lose a customer because of sloppy data handling is tragic.

Short-Term Memory
One not-so-conservative approach to the issue of data recovery is simply trusting that when and if disaster strikes, you'll be able to reconstruct your projects easily enough by relying on your own memory. Thinking back to more than one painful experience, I'll admit to poor results when trying to recreate some inspiration or complicated task from memory. And file recovery programs such as Norton Utilities come with no guarantee of performance: The process can be lengthy, and the resulting files can be a mess or incomplete, particularly if the disk was written to after the files were lost.

The quick and easy solution is to create redundant copies on a second, high-capacity storage device attached to your computer, such as a second hard disk. The safest work habit is to save your files every few minutes and then copy the current document or project folder to the second drive every hour or so -- more often as your deadline approaches.

Using the Save As command in your current application may seem the easiest and most convenient way of creating this redundant copy, but it's also the fastest route to confusion: It's all too easy to find yourself working on a copy of the file rather than the original, destroying the whole concept of data integrity and file control. To avoid any ambiguity, I now click out of the application onto the desktop and simply drag the file icon to an alias or a shortcut on the target storage device.

Some applications, such as Adobe Photoshop, offer a Save a Copy command for this purpose. However, I still prefer saving the copies manually on the desktop. First, it's possible to slip up in the menu or keyboard and perform a Save As command. Second, I can remember the actual file name better than its "Copy of ..." version when viewing files by name. Third, my emotional confidence in the process is reinforced by seeing the copy process on the desktop.

The Hard Stuff
Whatever software approach you follow, your choice of backup hardware will play a huge role in determining the convenience, speed, and flexibility of your backup solution. Ironically enough, people can be passionate about backup solutions, and plenty of good approaches exist, but for fast, portable, low-hassle backups I prefer external FireWire hard drives, both for Mac and Windows platforms. I recommend an external FireWire drive with a capacity between 40 and 60 gigabytes.

The cost of these drives changes almost weekly, but it's safe to say that prices are quite good. A "clunky" 3.5-inch drive with a built-in power supply will cost less than $400, and for this purpose I don't see a need for using smaller, 2.5-inch lightweight drives, which cost more and offer less capacity. Users of many Windows machines and older Macintosh models will need to purchase a FireWire PCI adapter, which typically costs less than $95.

Buying an internal IDE drive for your system may work just fine for you, but I favor external drives for their flexibility in the event something does go wrong. For instance, let's say your system dies altogether: With an external drive, you could begin working with your project again in short order on another system. An external drive also gives you another way to move files between systems even in good times, when your hardware is behaving perfectly well.

FireWire Pros, Cons
Even if your machine has a built-in flavor of SCSI interface, FireWire is still a better solution to my way of thinking: Cutting-edge flavors of SCSI drives are faster, but they can also be very expensive, with a cost per megabyte roughly double that of FireWire drives.

Several vendors at last month's Macworld Expo demonstrated a new technology that should improve the performance of FireWire drives. FireWire hard disks combine an IDE hard drive with a small logic board that bridges the internal IDE and external FireWire interfaces. The first generation of these IDE-to-FireWire bridge chips lacked support for the Ultra DMA data transfer modes available in modern IDE drives, limiting sustained data transfer rates to less than 15MB per second. But the forthcoming second-generation chips will support speeds of up to 40MB per second, leading to as much as a doubling of real-world performance, depending on characteristics of the particular drive. ADS Technologies and Granite Digital were the first companies to announce drives with the improved bridge chip, and sooner or later all vendors will transition to the faster logic.)

Some readers will point out that almost everyone has at least one form of removable-media drive connected to their machine. So why bother with a FireWire hard drive when there's a CD-Recordable or ReWritable drive available, or the familiar Iomega Zip or Jaz? First, a single FireWire hard drive is easier to work with than the numerous removable cartridges or discs you'd need to backup the same number of files. And the high capacity of a hard drive gives you plenty of room to create multiple redundant copies of a project. (At the end of the day have you ever wished you could go back to the way your project was in the morning?) In addition, speed is essential when copying very large files, which leaves out CD-R, CD-RW, and hard drives connected with USB. In short, the fewer obstacles we put between ourselves and sound backup procedures, the more likely we are to keep ourselves out of trouble.

Building Your Own
A number of peripheral vendors now offer inexpensive SCSI-to-FireWire adapters that let you put an existing legacy drive to work, but most older SCSI drives or even small drive arrays lack the capacity available in a single modern drive. I am also concerned with recent reports of incompatibilities and driver conflicts with some of these connectors.

A more compelling choice may be one of the numerous offerings that let you add an IDE drive to an external enclosure that includes an IDE-to-FireWire adapter. If you take this approach with a new, fast, high-capacity IDE drive, the end result should be much the same as if you bought a high-capacity external FireWire drive, but you'll save yourself $100 or so on the hardware. Such IDE-to-FireWire enclosures are available from numerous manufacturers, including ADS Technologies, FireWire Depot, MacAlly, and others.

Finally, before purchasing a FireWire hard drive, host adapter card, or build-your-own enclosure, get assurances from the vendor's technical support that the solution will work with your computer and operating system. For example, some devices on the Macintosh may have trouble running under Mac OS 8.6 or the new 9.1 update. And on the Windows side, some vendors may have conflicts with Windows 2000 or with other hardware.

Ancient Wisdom
Having run into my own little data-loss disasters here and there over the years, I've come to believe in the approaches I outline in this article, but no one backup approach or solution will be the best for every user. Precisely how you prepare for disaster isn't important as long as it allows you to save your work frequently -- and to salvage it when something goes horribly wrong.

In case my admonitions seem like overkill to some (or most) readers, I'll fall back on the wisdom of the sages. As the Talmud says: "Don't worry about tomorrow; who knows what will befall you today?" Believe me, one of these days, worrying about your data will pay off.

This is David Morgenstern's first column for creativepro.com. He is a a freelance writer, editor, and branding consultant based in San Francisco.