Why You Need to Back Up Your Data!
One week before we were scheduled to go to print I had to leave 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 while putting the finishing touches on the magazine at night. I must say I was pretty proud of the new issue. I had totally revamped the layout and the cover story was going to be one of the best I had done. There was only one story left to complete before I could send everything off to print and I decided to write it on my phone on the way home. After getting back to Atlanta I stayed up till 5AM getting caught up on emails and paperwork when the unthinkable happened... ME!
The next morning I grabbed my external hard drive and a power adapter from my laptop bag so I could copy the files to my desktop but for some reason my hard drive wasn’t connecting. The lights just kept flashing on and off. After five minutes of tinkering with it, I realized that I had grabbed the wrong power adapter. I had accidentally plugged my laptop's (AC) adapter into my hard drive.
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 plan, paperwork and tons of contacts. I didn’t even have a copy of the company logo and all it took was one slip up.
Sometimes people have to bump their heads before they learn a lesson, while others have the luxury of learning from watching them do so. Let this be one of those times where you learn from watching. 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 tips and protect yourself from my misfortune.
- Backup any files that can not be easily recreated. (i.e. Protools Sessions, Graphics, Beats or Business Data)
- Make regular backups (Monthly, Weekly, and Maybe Even Daily) of any files that change often.
- 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.
- 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.
Comments
Post new comment