Back it Up

We had a minor catastrophe around here this weekend, which will explain my lack of blogging for the past 2 days. A minor problem, mind you . . . nothing good old computer engineer Jim Dahlby can't fix.

One of our three external hard drives was corrupt. Yes, we have THREE external hard drives . . . my photos are large in size because I capture digital negatives instead of jpegs. I fill up space fast. I don't know much about computers . . . but my average shoot takes up about 4 gigs of space, and apparently that's a lot. I don't even save everything -- I delete client files after 1 year -- but we still need a lot of disk space to house all of our photos. So, we have our hard drive and 3 others around here, providing me with enough space to go about my photo-taking.

Whenever the computer starts acting weird, I just stop what I'm doing and tell Jim. He's my go-to, and he's never let me down when it comes to fixing this here machine. Like I said, I don't know much about computers . . . enough to be dangerous and a lot about Photoshop, but that's about the extent of my knowledge. On Friday, I let Jim know that the external drive housing all the 2008 files was giving me fits . . . so into the office he went. And he didn't come back out for a while.

It took him pretty much all weekend, but he did recover what appears to be all of the 2008 images from our corrupt drive. (THANK YOU, my love.)

Let me remind you what happened to us in 2008: Kate was born, Meg turned 2, we traveled to New York, Kansas, built the swing set, remodeled the basement, etc etc . . . and I did more photo sessions than I care to count. I really didn't worry about my client files (the families had all been given at least ONE disk), and I knew we had burned nearly everything to CDR in case this ever were to happen . . . but the idea of losing my 2008 memories was still scary. It felt very final.

It made me realize how priceless my photographs really are. How much they mean to me. What a part of me they are. If I lost a big chunk of them -- like all of 2008 -- I would have been devastated.

Thank God for Jim and patience . . . he figured out how to recover everything, and he even figured out what we need in order to avoid this in the future. Let's just say that -- after a heavy investment -- we will have the Fort Knox of computer security around here. NOTHING will be lost in the future.

The moral of this story: BACK IT UP. Back up your computer, your photos. Burn them to disk, whatever you have to do. And if you don't know how -- ask your husband to help. Ask anyone. Just do it. The memories you have in photos and videos that might be housed on your hard drive are priceless. When you are staring at a computer message that reads, "The disk containing this file is corrupt . . ." you will quickly know exactly how irreplaceable those memories are.

Back to up and running, so I must get to editing my little sleepy newborn from Sunday . . .