Why you should always back up your pictures

Well I went through all mine on my laptop on Wednesday, updating folders & tidying up, there’s almost 10,000 on there now & counting…! I backed them all up to my mobile hard drive. Not done so for 4 months – naughty. But one copy alone isn’t enough anymore, so I went out yesterday, bought a 32 gig USB stick & “double backed up” to that…

See, it all went wrong about 6 years ago, long before we got the boat. I spent all my spare time for weeks scanning & importing shiny paper photos. About 3,000 at the time, maybe more, it was all family stuff. Right from the kids as babes, holidays, experiences, good times, friends & family etc. Precious stuff. Those were the days of backing up to DVD’s & 4.7 gig of storage was a wonderful thing…

Except it got a bit complicated when it came to backing everything up, I mean music would only fit on one, docs would only fit on another & pictures on another…

I’ll never forget that day of disaster, I was installing Windows XP Pro. So I backed everything up across several DVD’s beforehand. Each had a neat little sticker on it to let me know what was what & where was where. So I spent ages getting everything neatly “filed…”

After I’d finished installing the new O/S I reached for my trusty DVD’s & started restoring data. When I picked up my Pictures DVD (with big label slapped on it saying so), it went in the disk drive & came up with “empty disk.” After checking several options of which none were viable, I finally realised those 2 words were indisputable. I was truly gutted, I’d remembered everything except my pictures. The only saving grace was that I’d kept every single shiny paper photo, & they remain with us now aboard TT in a storage box under the bed…

Thing is, even though they’re all sealed up, shiny paper photos don’t last forever, & I sure don’t want to go through the scanning process of that lot again!

Bright idea of the day: So does anybody out there fancy a nice little job for a few weeks…? Unfortunately it would have to be on a voluntary basis due to lack of funding. It would also have to mirror the Big Bang Theory Big Society Model, erm, due to lack of enthusiasm. [Almighty groan]