This is just a reminder to anyone reading this that you can never back-up important projects enough. I got up this morning and fired up the computer & drives (I have a bunch because of the size of the HD video files) only to find that only one folder showed up. Now, sometimes there’s just a glitch on startup so I shut down and restarted….and again, on my main work drive, only one folder showed up (and it wasn’t anything I needed…why does That always happen?).

I just sat there…shocked and horrified…could I have really lost all of my latest work on the film? Hours & hours of viewing, cutting, renaming and organizing clips? I was frozen, just staring at the screen like a zombie. I couldn’t think…I even forgot to breathe for a bit. This is a nightmare to anybody who uses a computer…you never think it will happen to you, until it does!

Now, I knew I had all my raw footage backed-up on two different drives to keep it safe, but realized that I hadn’t backed-up all the logged and organized footage for this project…or all the NLE projects, title tests, super slomo tests, etc. I now realize that back-up should be EVERYTHING pertaining to the project. So, for this project that’s about 350Gb.

After a cup of coffee (and a lot of pacing & thinking), I decided to run the error-checking tool and see if I could find everything on that drive….with a little luck and about 6 hours later, there it was. All the data had been found and everything seems to be in order. Thank God.

The rest of the day (and even as I type this post), I’ve been backing-up ALL data from the 2Tb drive and “eating my crow”. I can’t remember how many times I’ve helped others rescue data and preach to them about back-up, back-up, back-up.

With 5 minutes to go, I’ve now backed-up 1.8Tb and I think I can sleep tonight. Having wasted a Saturday doing this is well worth the effort & piece of mind. So I leave you with these words of wisdom….

Back-up, back-up…and back-up again!