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.

__________________
thinktankproduction.com

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.

__________________
The United States will conquer Terrorism with the help of God and a few Marines.

Some people, when trying to avoid thinking about those things that cause them pain, turn to drink, or perhaps food, or drugs... I turn not to any of those... I collect action figures, turning my mind to the hunt, so that I might find a mote of peace... Over the years, I've found that alcoholism is much more socially acceptable by far.

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.

__________________
"Better to fight for something than live for nothing." -- George S. Patton

My Flickr

My Want List

My Photography Page

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.

__________________
*~~~{==========- Death at Midnight -==========}~~~*

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.

__________________
So far, this is the oldest I have ever been.

I am backing up everything I got first thing tomorrow!

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!