Why backups are important

‘cos they are. Capiche?

I’ve always been one of those people who bang on about the importance of backups but doesn’t 100% follow their advice. I mean, I have photos on my phone, on my memory cards and I’ve then always copied them onto a harddrive as a “backup”. At work, I make sure that I have three copies of everything. But my home stuff, the truly important things, aren’t really properly protected. Luckily enough I’m scatterbrained so there’s files here there and everywhere but piecing them together will take weeks (it has already taken days)

Our grandparents never had to worry about such a thing. Photos were printed out and you got the negatives in a wee pouch that kept them safe. Colours may have faded but you still had them. Now, I can’t even remember the last time I got pictures printed (that’s actually a lie; it was our wedding photos for my parents. A year ago.). All my precious memories are contained electronically. If I want to remember our wedding, I’ll either log onto facebook to check the uploads or check the folder on my hard drive.

Or I used to.

Until for some inexplicable reason, the friggin’ thing decided to corrupt all my pictures and my graphics.

I lost hundreds of fonts, graphics packs and tens of thousands of pictures. Because I didn’t think that my backup could do with a backup. There’s nothing wrong with the hard drive, it’s just corrupting everything for some reason. (Luckily it didn’t corrupt our music. All 3TB of it.)

So here we are, with my old hard drive on one side and the new one on the other, trying to move anything left over to the other side, and running various recovery programs to try and find some files that can be recovered. If that doesn’t work, I’ll need to send it away to be taken apart, to be put back together.

Backup your stuff people. In a physical drive as well as a cloud one. And keep the originals. And put them in a safe. In a bomb shelter. And throw away the key. Because y’all don’t want to be doing no blogging with no pictures now!