Backup Backup Backup

Wednesday, 29 August 2007

I only started printing hard copies of the digital pictures sometime last year and keeping them in albums. And that practice only started after reading stories of people losing their pictures kept in CDs, due to unexpected but avoidable circumstances. I have been taught to backup workfiles, diskettes, information, when I was working in the office before.

Regrettably I didn't practise that with all my digital pictures at home. I was so confident that they would be safe at home. I was terribly wrong. It was my own fault that I lose all the digital pictures that I have in one particular pendrive. And to serve me right for being over confident, out of all my digital pictures, they have to be pictures of the family.

The pendrive was scanned before I brought it to the photo studio for reprints of certain pictures. There were no threats. It was scanned again tonight and there were so many threats - TROJAN. I just watched in horror as my Anti-Virus software detected them and deleted the files one by one! All the pictures were deleted. The only file left in the pendrive was a Microsoft word document.

I couldn't imagine how disappointed I would have felt if I had not printed any of those pictures! Once upon a time I had formatted a work diskette and I lost the document I had typed. Luckily it was the only document in the diskette! That was not too bad. I had lost a day of work but the work was replaceable. What if I have not printed a hard copy of some of the pictures or have some of them posted in my blog? The pictures are captures of the moment. The clock does not turn back.

I am glad I have posted some of the pictures in my blogs. I can copy them and save them again. The pictures are gone forever but I am glad I am able to copy some of them back.

Maybe this is a good thing. One can keep too much pictures and what happen to them? Will the pictures be looked at, etc. etc. in 10 years, 20 years' time? Maybe some pictures, but not all of them.