Hindsight being 20/20 and all of that, I am just now realizing that when the hard drive on my new laptop went KABOOOOOOM! BUH-BYE! ME NO WANTY TO WORK ANYMORE! I probably should have been a little bit worried.
But I wasn't.
At all.
That, my friends, is the magic of knowing that you have a good system for backups in place.
This all went down probably about a month ago. I was in the midst of editing some photos from a incredibly gorgeous and fun wedding when my laptop was suddenly just very non-responsive. It is, literally, a new laptop, meaning that it well under warranty. Several hours of tech support later, a new hard drive was on the way. With that new hard drive came absolutely nothing.
Not a single one of the files from my old hard drive could be retrieved. Nada. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Everything was gone.
But I didn't care.
I didn't care because every single photo I take exists in multiple places. Things get backed up on an external drive just about daily. They get backed up to an online directory pretty much weekly. And, in the instance of client photos (you know, the ones that people pay me to take), they exist on the memory cards until I'm absolutely certain I don't need the original files anymore.
So. I have a lot of memory cards.
But I lost a hard drive and didn't lose a single photo.
So I guess what I'm saying is that it's best not to procrastinate that business with backing up your files. Even if you're using a pretty new laptop, things can go bad with virtually no warning. You'll get to spend hour after hour dealing with tech support (and ZOMG IS THAT PAINFUL), but ...
no memories will be lost, and THAT is what matters.
Now I just have to catch up from losing out on two weeks of productivity.