If you’ve attended a workshop or One on One with me, then you’ve heard me preach, teach and drill into your head the importance of redundancy. Presently, my photo back up looks like this:

Back up to dual layer dvd.
Back up to second dual layer dvd.
Back up to DVD
Back up to portable hard drive
Transfer to one of eight working drives

I send the second dual layer dvd drive off site to remote storage back up. This is PARAMOUNT to having a digital photo business as dvd’s become scratched or unreadable. I know what you’re thinking; Dude, you’re crazy so much backups! and I say no, not at all! You NEVER know when you’re going to need them and might as well be safe than sorry.

That brings us to today.

As you can see, for the time being we are rocking the year old layout and categories. You will notice that this is the second update for 2012. Hurricane Sandy wiped out my former server companies facility. I didn’t have a current local backup of my sites as they back up every night at midnight. I was under the auspice that knowing in advance a HURRICANE was coming, the server company would make working backups of all client files and temporary host them or have them ready to be hosted on backup hardware in a different state. This wasn’t the case. As was explained to me by the owner, they had their backup servers located in the SAME ROOM as the prime servers and as a result the storm took out the primary server and the flooding took out the overnight backup. Why someone would have a data storage company ground floor and below is beyond me, but this is not my specialty.

As a result, I have lost everything from April 2011-Nov 2012. Everything. Over a year of updates gone. At first I was beyond angry that this happened, then I realized I am victim of my own teachings. Due diligence in backing up isn’t afforded only to photos and files, but to EVERYTHING that is of value. Moving forward I will be making at least bi-weekly backups of my sites and making sure to have a mobile fully functioning backup so if another hurricane comes, I’ll be ready.

Difficult lesson learned.