Wake up call.  Again.

Last year, I had a massive hard drive failure and knew I needed to implement a good backup system.  Last week, a huge reminder of the importance of backing up happened again…this time at the expense of our dear friends, Josh and Amanda.  Thursday morning, they woke up to…well…a whole lot less than they had the night before.  Their house had been robbed while they were sleeping.  I feel completely mortified and violated and it wasn’t even my house or my items.  27″ iMac, iPad, jewelry, printer, wacom, memory cards…GONE.  As if the mess of dealing with it and heartbreak isn’t enough, now Josh (also a photographer) has to hope and pray his automatic backup system to his external hard drives worked properly so that he has all of his files and documents.

Friends, please don’t think you are immune.  If it isn’t a hard drive failure, it could be something completely out of your control…a robbery…or perhaps a fire or other natural disaster.  I just can’t imagine how devastating it would be to not only lose all of my family videos and images, but all of the client images and files I have spend the last five years creating!

BACKUP…and then backup again.

How do I do it?  When I import my images into Lightroom from my CF card, I automatically send a raw backup to one external hard drive, and another jpg backup to another hard drive.  So, my images are saved as raw files on my Mac and one hard drive, as well as jpg files on another hard drive.  I then use an online backup service, Backblaze, to continually back up all of my jpg files from the external hard drive, as well as all of my documents from my Mac.  I like the convenience of an online backup, but I know that some people use DVD’s or external hard drives as a final backup and then store them in a fire proof safe.

If any of you have any other good ideas for backup, I would love to know!!!