Why it is Important to Save Artwork Online

Creating artwork can be an extremely satisfying process. Regardless of your skill level, your medium of choice, or if you do it professionally or as a hobby, there's no debate that creating a piece you are truly happy with can be a long and arduous process. Once you're finished and satisfied with your handiwork though, there is one final thing you should do before displaying your piece or handing it off to your client. You should always document your work, be it a photograph, a scan, or for those who use a digital medium, create a backup file both in an editable format (such as a psd, ind, ill file) and pdf. Accidents can happen, especially to physical work like paintings or drawings, and the test of time can eventually take their toll. Creating digital backups is important for a few reasons.

Portfolio Building

Whether you're a budding artist still finding their style or a professional who's mastered their craft, it is always important constantly build your portfolio. One of the best ways to build and organize a portfolio is to make digital copies of all your pieces and save them. Being an artist myself, I personally like to save two copies of every work I finish. One I save to an external hard drive specifically for my artwork, which is separated into folders for compressed pdf files of my final work, the raw editable file (such as photoshop documents and illustrator files) as well as a folder with all of my assets such as reference photos and images used in some of my photo collage pieces. This ensures that no matter what happens to my computer, should it get a virus, the hard drive decides to give out, or it suffers some kind of physical damage, my artwork is safe on the external. The other copy I send to cloud storage or some kind of online storage. While external hard drives are great for storage, accidents can still happen, and if something happens to the external hard drive, then I'd be completely out of luck. You can easily use a home document management software to compile, organize, and upload your files to online storage.

Profit

Creating freelance work or product with your personal artwork on them is becoming more and more popular. There are plenty of websites that let you upload your artwork and handle the actual production side of things for you, creating and shipping things like shirts and mugs on order, and pay you a small cut of the markup for each order. Having all of your artwork stored digitally and online makes setting up a storefront on one of these websites a breeze, as you can just grab the file right from your online cloud service and in most cases just drag and drop it right into the file manager on one of these websites. The more organized you are, the easier it will be to get your products set up.

Sharing and Collaboration

Sometimes you'll want to work on pieces of art collaboratively. Whether you're working with a group to create film and video, or working with writers and editors to make graphic novels, sometimes the ability to share your progress and other elements of your work becomes essential. With online storage, you can usually give individuals access to certain files or folders via links and setting up shared folders they can access. This makes the collaborative process much easier, and allows multiple people to view, edit, and save files as necessary so that you can work at your own pace without having to meet up somewhere to get anything done.

All in all, online file storage has a lot of benefits for creatives, be it the security of knowing your files are safe, the ability to easily share and sell copies of your work digitally, or making collaboration an absolute breeze. With many online storage sites offering free options up to a certain amount of total storage, and most monthly services being fairly inexpensive, there is no reason not to take advantage of online storage.