Public Service Announcement

[thewhitelily]

Back up your data, my sweets.

If you lost your main storage of your most precious data right this minute, how much could you reconstruct?  No really, how much would be just gone?  Poof!  It could happen to you! Or anyone! Even me!

In related news, after a very stressful day, I think I have managed to miraculously piece together MOST of the family photos from the last year that I accidentally permanently deleted.  While trying to back them up.  *headdesk*

Back up your data, ok? Carefully.

Comments

[ancientreader]

OH. MY. GOD.

Er, automatic backups to an external hard drive?

I can't even imagine the cold despair of that moment when you realized the files were gone. So glad you were able to recover most of them -- do you think one of those data-retrieval services might be able to scare up the rest?

[thewhitelily]

Yeah. I found a lot of the photos on my old phone which we had replaced as it was near-useless, but which was my main camera and I had never finally cleared the data from. Its cache magically almost completely aligned with the missing files. We're missing a few months in the end, but the important events in that time period, I'd actually facebooked, so we have the best photos picked out anyway.

It's possible we might have been able to get more with a data-retrieval service or program, but... the reality is it's unlikely and extremely difficult. If we'd had important events completely lost or the kids had been tiny babies, or if it had been a longer time... it probably would have been worth the trouble. As it is, we'll just chalk it up to a learning experience--and think about how much worse it could have been, and make sure it can't happen again. :|

[mafief]

EEP!!!
Can relate and it's one of the worst feelings! We save everything on the cloud now because of incidents with my research and needing to keep data and writing for projects safe.

[thewhitelily]

Yeah, this was unfortunately a human error problem--I thought I was copying files when in fact I cut them, and then put the 'copy' in the wrong place and immediately deleted it. AAAAAARGH. Humans are humans.

I had an incident where my honours thesis document became corrupted, and I've been slightly neurotic about document backups since then. Family photos... we've been meaning to get around to. *facepalm*