Last night Scott came in the room I was in and looked so pale and upset. He was freaking out. He said he thought he had lost ALL of our pictures. As in pictures from the last 10 years including Harper's first 14 months of life.
Now I need to explain a little about our relationship. I am extremely Type A and I am the one who is always freaking out about every little thing. I will lay awake worrying myself sick over things and when I tell Scott about them - he just shrugs his shoulder. A tornado can be one mile away and I will be in the closet with a pillow over my head screaming and he will be standing outside. He NEVER gets upset. So when he came in and said "Can you pray for me? I'm about to be sick". I knew it was serious.
Probably our greatest possession outside of each other are our pictures. You just can't replace them. I tried to remain calm. I kept saying "No one is dying. No one has cancer. That's something to be upset about. " and I kept thinking "well at least I blog every single day with our good pictures so they aren't totally lost" (another good reason to blog!) ha!
The thing is we shoot our pictures in raw so the files are HUGE. Our computers can't hold them. We also take tens of thousands of pictures each year now because of Harper. So Scott stores our pics on an external hard drive, has a back up hard drive and also uses a service on the Internet to back up. But last night he decided to transfer the original hard drive and when he did - it "bit it". And the only way to fix it was to re-format it and basically erase it. And then when Scott checked the back up and our on-line service at first he thought he had found they weren't backing up. And then he thought they only had pictures through October of last year. Which I kept saying "then we are missing half of Harper's life!"
(Why does my family look they are about to go to a LSU game instead of church? This was NOT planned! ha! And I had on purple today too!) ha!The good news is we DID recover all of our pictures and they were backed up but we are definitely taking steps to NEVER worry about that in the future!
The moral of this story is BACK UP Your Pics!! You never think it will happen to you until it does and seriously I would have been devastated to lose Harper's pictures. I thought if I shared maybe a lot of you would think about taking action. Put your pictures on CD's or get an external hard drive. Or use a service. We use www.mozy.com. I think it's $50 a year but trust me that was worth every penny last night. A photographer in my area told me about www.zenfolio.com. Whatever you do - please don't lose your pictures! They are priceless treasures!P.S. Audra just put this in the comments - but same goes for videos!! Scott has been putting all our videos on tapes thank GOODNESS! And this is cominig from a girl who taped over her wedding video with oprah. YES I DID! (luckily we had a few other copies).
P.P.S. I'm laughing because Scott just sent me an e-mail (from the other room) with his "own update" to this post. So here is Scott in probably his first and only guest blog!
- If you're not backing up, you're asking for it. start now!
- Use multiple options.
On-site (external drive)Off-site (on-line back up service)Off-site (burn data to cd's/dvd's and put them in a safety deposit box @ your local post office)
- simulate that pending catastrophe by performing periodic restores from your backup(s). get comfortable doing this!
