A few years ago I did something very stupid.
Having recently filled my 250 gig external hard drive, I figured it was time to upgrade. I dropped something like $200 on a decent 1 terabyte drive and moved all my music, photographs and designs to the new drive. I even formatted my old drive and planned on backing up my finalized files to the old drive on a weekly-ish basis.
Emphasis on the word “planned.”
Stupid. So, recently my aging 1T drive flatlined. And three weeks later, after a number of visits to the local computer-magic-recovery-workers, I’m coming to the realization that most of my important, valuable files are gone.
This has caused an all-out, heightened and accelerated ride through the Kübler-Ross model. This blows.
So I urge you all to back up your files. Right now. Quit reading and back everything up.
Interestingly, though, this has given me the opportunity to step outside of my own little design world and do some honest reflection on my work. As I’m pouring through hundreds of arbitrarily named files, I’m realizing that a lot of work that I once had in my portfolio—stuff that I was once really proud of—sucks.
It’s just not that good. It’s not the type of work that I stumble upon online and gets my heart racing and my fingers itching for a mouse (go ahead, mock me for not using a tablet yet) or my camera. It’s not the type of work I want to be producing.
Maybe it’s that I’m too close to it. Maybe because I have intimate knowledge of each piece—I know exactly the methods I used to produce each one or I know roughly how much Cold Smoke I had consumed the night I made it—it’s lacking the mystery and ambiguity of others’ work.
But then there’s the occasional piece that pulls at my heartstrings, because I know it’s among the best I’ve created, or there’s the pit in my stomach because I’m still not sure if my “Property of the State of Montana” pano has been recovered.
This has been a roller-coaster ride, to say the least. Out of it, though, I hope to be producing better work, with less bullshit. That’s the work that I’ll populate this new blog with.
In the meantime, my new backup plan is to store a “Current Jobs” folder on my local hard drive which would be mirrored on a new external hard drive (containing everything). Finished files will be backed up in an online storage system. I still haven’t figured out which online storage system is best, so if anyone has recommendations, let me know in the comments, on Facebook or shoot me an email.
P.S. Go back up your shit.