Most people are aware of the need to back up their data in case their computer is lost or damaged, but there is something else to consider with all your creative work. It's all well and good backing it up and putting it safely in storage, but you need to be able to get it out again at a moment's notice.

Two recent blog posts, based around US politics and photography, reminded me of this. The first was on Robert Scoble's Blog concerning his time with the John Edwards campaign. After the story broke of Edward's affair, Scoble recalled a picture on the campaign jet of Edwards and the proverbial 'other woman.' A photo which at the time meant little, but took on a new light with the recent news.

Scoble uploads many of his pictures to online services such as Flickr, and these have a system that allows you to tag works with words and phrases, alongside the text description you would normally expect. With the idea that a picture is out there, the time to find the picture in an online catalogue is not that long.

The second resulted in probably one of the key pictures of the US Presidency... Dirck Halstead was a photographer Eventually hiring an intern to plough through 5000 pictures by eye, the single picture from the fund-raiser was found - and that picture of Clinton embracing a smiling Monica made the cover of Time magazine.

The lesson should be obvious; you need to be able to navigate your archives and find your older media with ease.

Personally, I don't upload every single picture online (I tend to keep family pictures offline) but technology has helped with this. Digital media can carry a lot of extra information, even a well chosen file name and the date stamp can help order your archive, but there are software packages designed to help with the process by adding tags and descriptions to your media as you back them up... almost like a personal Flickr or Google Images that you can easily search.

There's even the rather arcane procedure of having a notebook to jot down each event you attend where you create media, note the dates, and a few lines to jog your memory - which also has the advantage of not being on a computer that could be lost (just don;t loose the notebook!)

But whatever you do, when you consider your data being backed up, also consider how you will find a single picture, video or message in that back-up.