FallingHorse

I recently re-discovered the importance of backing up all of my work and want to share my experience with you in the hope that it will save someone from the heartache of losing not onlyprecious family photos but many hours of post processing work.

I say ‘re-discovered’because I used to back up my data on a regular basisbut have never had to rely on a backup for recovery. And slowly, that invisible monster known as ‘complacency’ crept in.

Last Thursday while working on my PC, our power tripped out and upon re-booting everything, I found thatthe outage had caused my hard drive to become corrupted. Everything was Gone including my operating system. To say that I was upset would be a major understatement and to be honest, I cried myself to sleep, thinking of all of the photos of my family that I’d never be able to replace. All those precious moments gone in the time it would take to press the shutter button on my camera.

To make matters worse, I was planning a back up as soon as my portable disk drive arrived in the mail…. it turned up the following day, taunting me with it’s simplicity and sleek design!

I took my PC to a technician that specialised in forensic data recovery and I was luckythat he was able to recover all of my data. I was so happy I could have kissed him!!... at least, until I saw the bill. Let’s just say that it was an expensive excercise that could have been avoided, not to mention the week of downtime.

So anyway – the moral of my Journal is to say : Please, don’t rely on the interenet for storage of your data, art or images. Red Bubble isn’t designed as online data storage and will not retrieve your lost work from their servers. It is our own responsibility to ensure the security of our work.

Please, please, back up your data regularly to avoid the heartaching loss of your own precious family photos and artwork. If you don’t know how to create a back up … LEARN. Make it a priority! Put aside learning that new photoshop technique for the short time it will take to get your head around protecting your art.

In this case, Prevention really is the best cure.