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| Save, save, save. |
My hard drive crashed at the start of February. It was not pleasant, but this is what I had done that made it far from heartbreaking.
- I had backed up all my files in September on an external drive. Should have done it more often than that, but I wasn’t worried because….
- I got an account with Dropbox and set that up to automatically save all my writing files (the main files that change)
- I printed out a hard copy of a short story I had made changes to
- My husband had backed up almost all our house building pictures on his computer. However, he was missing the stop-action video I had been building.
What did that leave? The twenty pictures I had taken that morning, spent several hours working through, and fallen in love with. My computer died that evening. OUCH! (And I had removed all files from my camera memory since the majority had been backed-up. I thought what are the chances I could lose these few pictures before I get a chance to back them up.)
My heart was not broken, but I was very disappointed. While I was waiting to find out if my files were salvageable, I took a stab at replacing those twenty pictures. The two best that I could not get out of my mind were impossible to reproduce. But I found some great new shots that I wouldn’t have gotten if I hadn’t lost the original twenty.
Then what happened. My files were recovered — all of them. So along with my first twenty and those two favorites I picked up another twenty shots with several more favorites.
Lesson reinforced? Save your work. Back it up. Prepare for the worst so you lose the least. And be ready for the bonuses that come from not sitting down and weeping over the loss. Back those files up.