OH CRAP!!!!!!! Don't forget to backup

As a Network Manager, I am always telling the teachers and staff at school to make regular backups of the work they bring into school from home on a USB flash drive. Well, I should listen to my own advice because one of the worst things possible happened last week - 1 of 3 hard-drives in my home computer packed up, causing me to lose over 20Gb of MP3's, and over 10Gb of pictures (including personal pictures such as our Wedding day, honeymoon, and Kieran's birth pictures).

Fortunatly I did backup my music collection in July on one of the servers at the school, so I have only lost a couple of albums (which I am sure can be downloaded again if I can be bothered to look for them), but the pictures are a different story. After frantically searching through all my old backup DVD's in our bedroom, Michelle did find a backup that I made in mid 2006. Thankfully, I was able to restore the Wedding, Honeymoon and Kieran pictures, but it does mean that I have lost all pictures that I took between July 2006 and November 2007 - including last Christmas, and Kieran's 2nd birthday photos. Bugger!

Suffice to say, I am now backing all my data up - The original copies on my desktop PC, one backup on an external drive used only for backup purposes, and a copy on each of my 2 laptops.

So there you go.... A message to everyone - REMEMBER TO BACKUP YOUR VALUABLE DATA.