A Bump in the Road

Yesterday saw the sudden failure of one of my external hard drives.

Thankfully, the only thing related to this blog contained therein was the spreadsheet I'd been using to track my collections and - more recently - my eBay sales. That can be rebuilt, of course, but it was frustrating to find that the autobackup option was not enabled by default and, while the software does autosave its own backups every 15 minutes, those backups are wiped when the document is saved/closed.

All my photos are stored on another drive, but even those could have been re-taken if the worst had happened. I've ended up re-taking photos of quite a few toys, despite having rescued the originals from Photobucket before I closed my accounts there.

The main problem is that a number of ancillary files - such as the original Adobe Illustrator file from which this blog's banner was made - are gone. As are many files relating to my freelance work and personal projects. A good proportion of it is still lurking in emails, so it's just a matter of tracking it down and remaking spreadsheets, InDesign documents, etc. as appropriate, but it's still pretty frustrating, considering I've gone through more PCs than external hard drives over the years, and those drives have helped me transfer to new PCs almost seamlessly.

I guess the lesson here is that I should start to trust the Cloud a little more, and keep backups of my backups going forward.