Makin' It Magazine

One week before we were scheduled to go to print I found out that I would have to be going out of town for a funeral. So I loaded up my laptop and headed out to Indianola, Mississippi. I spent the next five days with my family and by night putting the finishing touches on the May 2007 issue of Makin’ It Magazine. I must say I was pretty proud of the new issue I had totally revamped the lay out and the cover story was going to be one of the best I had ever written. I had only one story to fi nish before I could send everything off to print. I decided to write it on my phone during the return trip to Atlanta. Well after we got back to Atlanta I was up till 5AM catching up with paperwork and emails. The next morning I grabbed my external hard drive and a power adapter out of my laptop bag. I hooked it up to my desktop so I could copy all the fi les for the May issue and send them to print but for some reason my hard drive wasn’t connecting. The lights just kept fl ashing on and off. After fi ve minutes of tinkering with it, I realized that I had the wrong power adapter plugged into it. I had accidentally grabbed my laptop (AC) adapter instead of the (DC) one for my laptop.

I immediately rushed my hard drive to a computer specialist and found out the drive had been fried. I then took the drive to a data recovery company and found out that they could retrieve the data for $1,400. All it took is a one simple mistake and in less than 30 seconds months worth of work and planning were gone like that. Not only did I loose the May Issue, but I lost the newly designed template for the magazine. I lost my business plans, My Forms, My Contacts, I didn’t even have a copy of the company logo and all it took was one simple mistake and less than 30 seconds. Learn from my mistake and make sure you regularly backup all of your important data. You never know when you may be a victim of natural disaster, theft, or just plain bad luck. Follow these following tips and protect yourself from my misfortune.

1- Backup any fi les that can not be easily recreated. (i.e. Protools Sessions, Graphics, Beats or Business Data)

2- Make regular backups (Monthly, Weekly, and Maybe Even Daily) of any fi les that change often.

3- All of your important data should be stored in three separate places. One of these locations should be offsite. This is incase you are the victim of natural disaster or theft. If your office/studio burns down and all your backup data was in there you will be in the same position as if you never had it.

4- Don’t procrastinate. Had I taken 15 minutes to follow this advice I could have saved myself $1,400 in data recovery fees and months worth of work.