Are you backing up?

Believe me, this is one screen you don't want to see if your a Photoshop Lightroom user.  Everything that came out of this event was positive for me but I'm pretty sure I'm safe in saying that for many people it may have not been such a positive outcome, let me explain.

I had just finished shooting my first bridal session a few weeks prior.  During those two weeks I had done some extensive editing, ranking and organizing of  photos.  My lightroom catalog is set to prompt me to backup once a week.  I'm pretty religious about backing up once a week but for some reason I told lightroom to skip the backup that week.  About a week later I had done a photo shoot of Jaidyn for her 1 year old pictures.  By the time the shoot was over I had well over 400 images to import into lightroom.  I had a few minutes after the shoot so I started importing all the files into lightroom.  This is where the fun begins...  My youngest daughter was playing with her two cousins and decided for some reason that playing under my desk would be fun.  An hour later I came to check on the progress of my import and was horrified when I found out they turned off my power strip (on accident) and shut down my computer right in the middle of the import.  I immediately powered up my iMac and opened lightroom.  All photos that had been imported were gone, no big deal.  I started the import over and successfully imported all the images.  After spending a few more days on the bridal photos I shut down lightroom and backed it up, Walla, this is the message that came up when it tried to start.  Oh crap... I have a deadline on these bridals and don't have time to redo all the editing.

As I started looking at my backup files I noticed that my lightroom catalog backup file was old enough that I would have lost everything that I had worked with on the bridal photos.  This is where the good news happened.  I have a dedicated 500GB external hard drive that I use for Apple's Time Machine for my backups.  I won't get into how it works but to make this long story short I was able to recover a lightroom catalog file from Time Machine to a file it had saved just a few hours before from when my daughter turned off my power strip.  I only lost a few days of editing instead of two weeks and was able to recover in a short amount of time.

I switched to a mac a few years ago and am very happy with that decision.  If you own a mac and are not using Time Machine you need to, it's very easy to setup and is a fairly good solution.  It's not going to solve all your problems but it's a good start.

When is the last time you backed up your important data?