Sunday, March 11, 2012

Backup! Backup! Backup!

It happens to everyone sooner or later, and if you're not prepared, you will regret it! My laptop's hard-drive failed the other day. I lost everything, or pretty much everything anyway. If you're following me here or on Youtube, you probably know that I've been working for the past couple of months on a short zombie animation. Well, I lost everything connected to that project, models, textures, reference pictures, everything.

I've ordered a new laptop and it'll be a week or two before I get it. If I decide to ressurect that project, I'll have to re-construct everything from scratch...and I'm not sure if I'll do that or start some new project. So whatever you do, backup your important data, whether you use some online service, or a local external hard-drive. To tell you the truth, the loss of my animation project isn't even what bothers me most. Mostly, it's the gigabytes of home videos and fmaily pictures that I've lost that bother me the most. My son salvaged some of our family photos from my hard-drive, and it's possible that with a little work and some money, I might be able to salvage some of the rest. I used to use an online back-up service, but canceled that when they instituted some unfair pricing changes. I never started backing up my data in any other way, and now I'm wishing that I had.

So do yourself a favor and backup you data somehow. Whether it's an online service or you simply copy your invaluable data onto an external drive or even a thumb-drive for that matter. There's nothing worse than realizing that you may have lost years of family memories!