Oh, my God. What did I do?

When I realized that I had lost 5 months of pictures (August thru December, 2011), that's what I said. "Oh, my God. What did I do?" I preach backups. I preach making sure you are sure that your data is reasonably safe. Backup to two externals, keep one safe at home (in a safe if you have one), and the other off-site (like at work). And here I loose 5 months of pictures. How? Thinking I had done a proper backup but without verifying it. Had to format a hard drive, so I had both backups at home, formatted the drive, then restored it - without verifying that the last 5 months of 2011 had NOT been backed up.

Ugh. It took me into a 100% depression. Gone. Disappeared. Memories - they're still in tact. But the pictures? MIA. And it was All. My. Fault. Stick a gun to my temple and pull the trigger.

So now I have at least one proper backup, and am making another. Am I so dumb and stupid to not doing this again? Dunno. I've already formatted memory cards without verifying I had already copied them to the computer. (Just did that last week at work.) Really? Am I getting that senile? Ugh.

So - why two copies? One is to protect against accidental deletion and/or hard drive failure. This one is the "parent". The version I reference on the primary hard drive is the "child". But what happens in the case of a catastrophic failure? Fire? Theft? Take an older copy - the 'grandparent' - off site to work or to a relative. To be completely covered, send it out of state. You could make a copy to put in a data-mine, but that's *really* expensive.

What to back up? I don't back up my system or applications. I can always restore those. The data is the part that once gone is gone. Back up the data. Pictures, taxes, Word/Excel documents - that stuff. And back it up twice.

Enough. I was able to use a utility and at least get some of the previews out of Lightroom into JPEGs, so all is not lost. But it hurts that they're reduced/downsized images rather than the full and final product. And I also was able to download the images I uploaded to Zenfolio, so I have full-sized versions of the final product. But I'm the kind of guy who always finds something else to fiddle with, and it's always a good practice not to change a picture that has been changed.

Time to get back to freezing time. 1/250th of a second at a time.