My Dio Story is dust.
 

My hard drive crashed last week. I lost everything, including all the pictures I have taken over the last 3 years or so. Toys, family, dogs, unmentionables, everything. I was pretty close to finishing my take on "Save Outrider." I am bummed out about it. I have a few shots on flickr and photobucket that I have not shown here, so I may put them up. Anyway, even though I had shot most of it, it really wasn't what I thought it was going to be. No photoshop is pretty limiting when you need a firefight or an explosion or something. A story to me is more about motivation and emotion anyway, so BOOOM! is not super important to me. I am thinking of a new one, with an idea ripped off from an old Joe cartoon idea that never saw the light of day.

That's about seventeen different kinds of suck, dude. I had been working a novel for about two years when the same thing happened to me. Fortunately I had sent it to a friend of mine an he just never deleted the e-mail. Backed up everything since then.

I started backing up everything last year after my wifes comp drive died with alot of our photos from the early 2000's. I had some of it backed up then but nowhere near what we lost.

Sorry to hear that TT. Maybe you could download the "unmentionables" again.

What is the best way to backup?

I backup straight to DVD. The most important stuff--source code, etc--I store offsite in a more secure location.

I feel your pain, I lost a bunch of stuff a couple of months ago like that.




Me, I now use an external hard drive and CDs.

I am backing up everything I got first thing tomorrow!

Best oprion, I lost a bunch of stuff for a dio several years ago, however it made me reinvent my ways of looking at things and now I feel I am doing stuff much better now. Then again might be my own opinon.

That is a genuine tragedy. That's why I back up everything to an external hard drive every week without fail. You can never be too sure.

Was it a flat-out hard drive failure? If it's just a corrupt Windows (won't boot), you might be able to read it on another computer and salvage some of the data.

It's wiped out. It started working again a few days later and it's totally empty

Man let me stsrt out by saying I feel your pain man! I cannot count the number of things like photos, drawings, variouse art pieces, ect......................... That I have lost too HD crash among other equally frustrating things! Don't let it get you down though, the end of the old is always the start of a new. Only this time the starting point is much more advanced and skilled than last time. AS far as those good ones lost to the Malfunction Abyss, remember we all saw em, so we know you aint lying. I too am flirting with disaster by not backing up. (I have a lot of super geek buddies with the ability to recover info from HDs like the FBI does, but thats no excuse) Cant wait to see what the New TT is gonna bring to the table!

As said by others, external hard drive (or another computer's hard drive), and make sure you keep the backup copy in another room than the main copy, out of reach of flooding, don't leave it plugged in to protect from power surges, etc. Also keep a third copy around of the really important stuff (passwords, legal stuff, address book...), in another building if you can (but beware of possible theft, of course). Don't update this third copy as often nor at the same time as the other backup, just in case your backup process accidentally corrupts the backup, so you don't destroy both backups at once.

CD-R(W)s and DVD-R(W)s are generally considered no good for long term storage, because they can degrade over the course of a few years. Of course, hard drives do too, but they tell you so, so you can replace the hard drive before you loose the data.

Paranoia ? No, all this learned from personal experience.

As a Network Admin/Engineer, I ALWAYS tell people "Back up your back ups!" if it's important! I have 3 External Drives. One I save EVERYTHING to ( I never save anything to my PC's Hard drive for more than about 72 hours, max!) , one I use to back up the first one every 3 months, and the third I use to back up everything at the begining of the year! I also have all my dios in PDF format on a 16 Gig Thumbdrive and on my shared drive at work!

External hard drives are the way to go, but remember, THE ARE HARD DRIVES, TOO! and they are just as prone (if not more so!) to failure. So, like I say, back up your backups! Backup is important, but Redundancy saves the day!

Most of you guys probably don't remember me with the dio story I used to have and I feel you pain. My laptop was stolen out of my truck and I lost everything. It has been at least a year since I've done anything with my Joes because I lost all my pictures, filecards access to my website that they turned off, it just made me sick to start over. I now back up everything.