backup…Backup!….BACKUP!!

I confess, I’ve been very, very lucky. I haven’t been doing my backups as often as I should, but last night I backed up ALL my most important works-in-progress.

Lady Luck must have been looking out for me because when I booted up my pc this morning, the harddrive on which I usually save all my data was…’inaccessible’.

When I looked at the map of my harddrives [I have two], my data drive didn’t even have the NTFS operating system structure. I had to format the drive in order to be able to use it again. Needless to say, I won’t be using it for anything critical from here on in. Once I can afford to have another one installed, it’ll be gone.

I have lost some data, including the most recent pics used in my blog, and a heap of raw footage from videos I’ve worked on, but at least all of that stuff was completed. The pics were uploaded to WordPress and the finished videos were uploaded to Youtube so I haven’t lost anything critical. That’s why I say I’ve been so lucky; if this had happened a few days earlier, I would have lost a week’s worth of video-in-progess. And if I hadn’t backed up last night… -shudder-

In case you’re wondering, I backup periodically to an external harddrive that can take masses of data. In between times, I backup work-in-progress data to a thumbdrive that sits on my desk all the time and is quick and easy to use. Unfortunately, I don’t back up data often enough.

I hope that most of what I lost was of the ‘might come in useful one day’ variety, but I won’t know until I go to use something and find it isn’t there. I tell myself I’ll be more organized next time, but I know my good intentions won’t last. How I wish each pc came with a dedicated backup drive and backed itself up at the end of every day…

-sigh-

Please…if you haven’t backed up your important data recently…go and do it now. I was lucky. You may not be.

cheers,
Meeks