I’m typing on my iMac after a huge data fire. I’m still sifting through the charred remains of my intellectual property. The digital images that I reproduce of my paintings are responsible for well over half of my annual income.
When I bought my shiny new iMac last year I thought that I was smart because I bought the computer system that they recommended to me at the Apple store. I bought an external hard drive to store my huge image files and that hard drive contained another drive that would mirror my data, two backups.
But one morning I was getting ready to print one of my images and my hard drive was not in my finder window. What?!
Here’s what happened. Despite what they sold me, they did NOT configure the external hard drive correctly. I only had one drive and it was fried.
After a whole lot of valuable time, I’m still discovering what creative assets have been lost, and maybe forever.
Fortunately, most of the unformatted images were backed up on CD but each one has to be painstakingly reformatted to print. And that’s time that I could be spending painting or selling.
To the credit of the Apple Store on Chestnut they tried their best to make it right. One of their Geniuses even walked me through setting my system back up after he had clocked out.
What now? I do have an external hard drive, with two drives, configured properly. And in case a tsunami comes roaring through my window off of the Pacific Ocean, I’ll be backing up to Mozy, an online data storage site. For $4.95 per month, I have unlimited storage, which I’ll need for my huge .tiff files.
Learn from my pain. Your images, your creative assets, could represent significant future income. Take the simple steps necessary to safe guard them.
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Carol,
Thank you for sharing. Your contact are another piece of mission critical data.
Ann
So sorry about your backup woes! It is so heartbreaking with it happens, especially when you thought you had taken the right steps for this NOT to happen!
I just want to mention that you want to make sure you also backup your contacts. One day I was sending out one of my emails to all my art contacts only to find my address book (on my mac) with only one single contact in it instead of the 1,200 that should be there!!— SCREAMS. It had been a month since I had backed it up but I also had recently got an iphone so they were on there too, phew! I have since found idrive lite app to back up from my iphone and I now remember to regularly backup my address book!
Thanks for mentioning Mozy, I will check that out too. :o)
Fortunately, my fine art photographer had a copies of the images that he photographed. I’ll still have to spend time formatting them.
Those images created before him are only on the failed drive. I’m about to get an estimate on the cost of recovery. I don’t think it’s going to be cheap but it may pay for itself over time. ugh!
Oh NO! Backing up my files is something I struggle with daily. The number of files and the file sizes has made CD’s or DVD’s impractical, but I don’t fully trust backing up solely to other hard drives. As you’ve experienced…they fail. I’ve had one fail too, but at that time I had my files on CD’s too. Unfortunately an online data service won’t work for me because I don’t have high speed Internet.
Sorry you have had this happen.