It’s been a little quiet over here, did you wonder where I was?  Well, the inevitable happened….my hard drive crashed, and I’ve been dealing with the repurcussions.  I came home from a week vacation in Lake Tahoe with my family, turned on my iMac, and there it was…the never-ending spinning wheel of death.  It just kept spinning, and never stopped! So, I made an appointment with the Apple store, and after some investigating, sure enough, the hard drive was bad.  So, they sent me on my way home to ensure that all my files were properly backed up. Now, being a professional photographer, I have many back up systems in place.  All of my dear clients’ images are backed up online.  I use Smugmug, which has so many lovely perks, the best one being that you can download the original sized file back to your hard drive.  I also have an external hard drive which keeps all of my personal images and videos.  The things that were in jeopardy were my documents/excel spreadsheets/mailing lists/other documents.  How could I be so careful with some information, but not everything?  Apple suggested I contact a 3rd party to extract and recover my data.

I called Mac Repair Los Angeles, and Alan came to the rescue.  He may have even been wearing a cape.  Not only did he recover everything, he also reinstalled all my applications, too.  He saved me.

I now religiously use time machine for my iMac. I also purchased a WD My Cloud 3 TB personal cloud storage device. It backs up my back up of all my personal stuff, including photos, videos, and all the iPhone photos from everyone in my family.

The reason I write this post? Well, if anything, let it serve as a public service announcement to back.up.your.stuff. Hard drives don’t last forever. They just don’t. And if you don’t have your precious baby/wedding/vacation/milestone photos and videos in at least 2 places, the day will come that the one place they are in will fail.  Don’t wait. Do it today, and if you don’t know how, find someone who does.