Back it up

[Jason K]

My laptop died today. I left it in the car all day a few days back (no, I didn't even crack the windows) and, while I've tried to keep it on life support, it appears to have given up the fight.

I really don't care that much about the laptop. It's a year and half old Toshiba and I've been eyeing the new ones recently. Also, most of my business files are backed up on my office desktop.

BUT - all of my photodocumentation was stored on the laptop, and only on the laptop. I feel like such an idiot. In case I'm not the only idiot on this forum, a word of advice- back up those photos.

#218 is looking good these days. However, when you compare her to how she looked at the beginning of this year, she's almost unrecognizable. She's like a kissed frog. And now I can't prove it.

I am accepting donations of project photos.........

[dasein668]

Is the problem with the harddrive? If not you can probably yank the drive and put it into another computer to recover some or all of the data. A good computer tech can probably rescue an amazing amount of data even if the drive is the problem.

[FloatingMoneyPit]

Jason, don't throw the thing out yet. There are tech shops out there that specialize in this sort of thing and can often work magic. Look around and get an estimate. Usually they'll charge something nominal for an initial assessment and it goes from there. I dun seen it on TV: recovered hard drives that sat in the bottom of a lake, run over by a car, burned in a fire, etc. You may get it all back, some, or none. How's that for specificity?
Having "before" pics are critical to psychological well-being and worth whatever the cost will be.

[Tim]

Man, it really stinks when that happens. Everyone blithely says to back things up regularly, but all of us know that it gets done far too infrequently. I lost a lot of Daysailor photos when my computer crashed a couple years ago. Fortunately, I had enough photos posted on the website to ensure that the documentation was adequate nonetheless, but I lost hundreds of unpublished photos forever.

In my case, the hard drive fried, and there was nothing that could be done. But it's always worth checking into before trashing the thing for good. When I got my current computer I vowed to buy and external hard drive for backups, but have yet to follow through. (Note to self...get movin, mistah!)

Photo documentation is the #1 thing I am concerned about losing, and I make backups every month or so now. No, it's not frequent enough, for sure, but it's something. This is one benefit of posting documentation on a website--that permenant record (unless something happens to the server...)

Financial data is the other thing, and I back that up weekly when I do my bil-paying busywork. The rest of the stuff wouldn't be the end of the world to lose, and I rarely back it up.