Confession Time
Yep, the unthinkable! I recently lost a batch of images … and I thought I was safe!
So, how safe are you? Read on to see how I fell into this, oh so easy, trap!!
It even happens to a techy!
We all know the importance of backups, of having a fall back, a fail safe solution. I’m a thru and thru techy and know the importance of backups. AND I did set-up a double layer, one to a USB drive and the other to cloud storage.
Corruption
So the source of my failure was data corruption. I tried to split a Lightroom catalog into two and messed it up. What Lightroom did though was to create my second destination (where I wanted the split part to go) with empty files. I didn’t notice this and promptly deleted the files from the first part.
No problem, I’ve got them in my backup – which worked fine. So what’s the problem, you ask?
Sometime Later
Sometime later, I discovered another directory tree that had been affected by the attempted split. I went back to my backup and … uh..oh … all the files there were ZERO bytes long as well. Because I had moved the files (copied and then deleted the source) both backup systems did not keep a copy of the source files and then over-wrote the destination files with the ZERO byte files. Had I noticed this straight away, as I did with the other directory, I could have restored them straight from backup.
A Reminder …
For me, it’s a reminder, firstly how backups work (might be obvious, but it eluded me at the time) and secondly to take a copy out of the cycle every once in a while. In the old days of tape backup, once a month the tapes were put to one side for a year.
So now I’m going to be copying batches off to DVD every once in a while. Just in case the un-thinkable happens again.
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