Nancy Sinatra on the radio, where are my go-go boots!

I have narrowly avoided wiping out 9 years worth of digital photographs (and some videos). 24,000 files. 37GB.

Despite having carefully made several backup copies and contingencies. A perfect storm of failures and still mysterious circumstances left them inaccessible.

I've felt ill the past few days thinking about the worst case scenario. Hell, even the 2nd worst case scenario (that being if the files were recoverable, but without the directory structure or date-taken info, leaving a pile of 24,000 unsorted photos) was too horrible to imagine.

Thankfully my strategy of several backups did mean that all the data was sitting there undisturbed, just inaccessible and I've now recovered the whole lot, seemingly in tact.

I would not have enjoyed seppuku.

Time to rethink the backup and recovery strategy.

On the flip side my rent has gone down again and as a thank you for my longevity (and never being late, never bouncing a check despite being unemployed most of last year) they are giving me $200 off my October rent and when I asked if they had a company they preferred to use for carpet cleaning she tossed in free carpet cleaning too. Not sure if they do carpet cleaning as a perk to living there or not, I was prepared to pay for it so I'm happy.

That is great, Marla!!

Oh, Greg, that is a helluva lot of files!! I put mine on an external hard drive, but there is no organization. I have tried to put the pics on discs along the way, but, pfft, yeah, I hope so.

What kind of computer do you have??? That is a lot of files! Glad they are safe.

Gorgeous morning, well rested legs, and a freshly tuned bike. Happy Monday everyone!

It's a system I put together myself. Sadly, I thought I designed it so disasters like this would be avoidable. But sh*t went so very wrong. Now that we're fully recovered I've significantly simplified the setup, hopefully avoiding future disasters/making recovery from future disasters less heartburn-inducing.

I'm burning all my photos to DVD and then sending them to an external hard drive. You might wanna back yours up to a hard format too, just send groups of folders to disc and label well.

It's old school, but in a pinch...

Just remember CDs and DVDs have a 5-10 year life span, so you'll need to check them out periodically and transfer them to new media to ensure their preservation

And with the rate we accumulate photos and videos, it'd be a never-ending game of catchup. We already fail to keep up with all of the organization tasks associated with the collection, adding the need to regularly burn disks won't solve a thing. Right now, all the backup happens automatically. And we're probably going to add one more layer (online backup service).

Nothing's permanent or fool proof. So I'm just using the "constantly make a zillion copies" theory, hard to blow them all away at once.

Geographic failover!