Years ago, when word processing was a fairly new consumer product, there was a joke about Jesus and Satan in a timed word processing competition. Seconds before the final buzzer, Satan's work vanished as the computers shut down. Jesus' work, however, remained. When Satan asked God how that was possible, God responded, "Jesus saves."
Silly joke, but sage advice. Save your work. Save it often. And the next bit of advice would be: back up your work to a secondary device, not to the same drive in which you create your work. Sigh.
My external hard drive crashed on Wednesday. Crashed hard. As in total physical failure. As in $1800 to recover the data. That means lost for good.
Brian, genius that he is, managed to save a good number of files as the drive was in its death throes. As it stands, the only real loss is pictures between March and July of this year and the YEARS worth of digital art I had created. Digital art supplies can be downloaded again (and Kim Klassen generously sent me direct links). Files I designed can be recreated. Family photos through 2012 are already archived on CDs. Brian saved all my teaching files. My 3Cs files are gone, but my clients have CDs of the best pictures and Vistaprint has my business cards on file. So, it's not a total catastrophe.
It was, however, a wake up call. As of now I am using Google Drive and Dropbox as off-site storage. Brian has installed a SIX TERABYTE network drive for the house, and set it up for daily back up. Bit by bit I will rebuild my stash, and maybe, just maybe, we will find a way to get the pictures back. (It helps to know a lot of computer geeks.) As for me: lesson learned.
Backing up now.
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