Let me remind you about the importance of backing things up.
I’ve developed a pretty solid remote backup plan. Key portions of my laptop, my desktop, and my studio PC are all backed up courtesy of Crash Plan. It’s already saved me a few times for simple, “Oops! Did I delete that file?”-type recoveries and I feel comfortable knowing that if something were to go really south, I’d be OK.
The one thing I don’t back up to Crashplan, though, is my external drive with all my music (and a few other things) on it. Instead, I bring that home from my office every month or so and create an image of it on a separate external drive. Here’s the thing, though: it doesn’t work so well when the night that you’re going to back up, it’s accidentally pulled off the table by a playing nearly-5-year-old. I’ve tried the freezer trick and been able to see a listing of files, but haven’t gotten anything off of that drive over other than some nice “ka-chunk” sounds on spin-up.
My most recent backup was from three months ago. Not great, but not the end of the world. Unfortunately, even with a local backup, it can be kind of a pain to restore things to the way they were before. I’ve lost quite a few hours waiting for image restoration, cataloging missing files (about 90 albums’ worth, in case you were wondering), etc. As much as it sucks to waste that time, at least I backed up.
Take whatever lesson you will from that boring story.
Posted in Technology