On the importance of planning

Quote of the day: “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Sunset at Medicine Lake

Two days ago my external hard drive that I store all of my current photos on crashed, leaving me to discover that my careful backup plans were not quite as good as I thought they were.  All is not lost, but I’m finding it much more challenging than I anticipated, getting my catalog of photos back as it was. Unfortunately, a few photos are lost forever.

I’ve talked about the importance of making good backups before (after my computer hard drive crashed) and I thought that I had a good plan that would make it easy to recover from a hard drive crash.

I was wrong!

Trying to save a few bucks, I had a manual backup system that I now realize was inadequate. On top of the inadequacies in my backup plan, I wasn’t always meticulous about doing backups as frequently as I should.

What about you? If you have photographs or data or documents that would be costly to lose, what kind of backup plan do you have? Have you tried a partial restore to see how well it will work?  Are you certain that all of your precious data is being backup up?

I know backing up data is not very interesting or fun so it’s easy to put it off. Take my advice and don’t put it off.  Create a plan and implement it. If you’re like me and likely to forget, don’t have a plan that relies on you to remember to do it. Buy backup software and schedule regular backups!  The price of large external hard drives keeps dropping. It is worth it to invest in a drive or two to insure that your important work is not lost.

Last night as I was driving home from a meeting, the clouds in the sky created the most beautiful sunset.  It was so gorgeous that I took a detour to Medicine Lake and used my iPhone to capture some photos (Note: the best camera is the one you have with you). Once again, I’m blown away by what great photos these phones take!

Here are few of the photos I made last night.

And one more from the previous evening at Big Willow Park in Minnetonka. I’ve never seen the marsh water so high as it is now.