Backup, backup and backup

Just a friendly reminder - backup your photos often.

I had been very lazy about sorting and filing my pictures since last November. I had about 1000 images in a series of folders that were on my list to "sort" into my different picture folders (my two kids birthdays, christmas, and ski vacation were all in these folders - so some photos that meant a lot to me). I finally decided to spend a few hours sorting them out. Had an odd hiccup with the computer - every folder that did not have a unique name yet (still had the same folder name as when I took them out of the CF) disappeared on me. Not in the trash, nowhere. I was devestated - 1000 lost images. I started to go through all sorts of work to try and recover the lost images, but it was looking like it would be a nightmare (I have 50-60,000 photographs on the hard drive I use, so the recovery programs found tens of thousand of JPEG files and I had no way to know which ones to recover).

Took a deep breath and went to my office where I keep a second hard drive with my backups on it. Turns out I had backed up about two weeks before this potential tragidy (and those two weeks I had been away on business, so all those photos were on my laptop). I ended up losing nothing, but came so close to losing some precious memories.

Why did I share this? Because I remembered doing my backup right after reading a story like this where a person really did lose their photos.

So, backup, backup and backup again!