Redundancy will save you

It’s not just about backup, media storage demands duplication to guard against worst-case scenarios

“How’s the baby sleeping?” I asked a friend about his daughter, who was born just weeks before.

He told me she was sleeping and that things were going well.

“We learned a lot from the first one,” he added.

I smiled knowingly and quipped, “Just make sure to take as many photos of the new baby as you did with the first.”

I saw a cloud pass over my friend’s face.

“Oh, we took so many…but my laptop was stolen. So heartbreaking. There was no backup.”

In my mind, I saw the laptop and photo library, stuffed with images of a smiling, happy baby, being snatched by gloved hands.

“No iCloud, Google Photos…anything?”

“It was 2016, wasn’t really using iCloud, Amazon Photos, Google.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Fact is, I've been in that position, though maybe not at that scale. Years ago, maybe 1999 or 2000, we had a home break-in. The thieves stole jewelry, gaming consoles, and basically whatever they could easily pocket or carry. This included my Hitachi Hi-8 camcorder, which had a tape inside of it of my then two-year-old daughter doing toddler things.

The tape and those memories were gone for good.

In my current OneDrive is a folder called new since 10–13–14. That was the date that my OneDrive and its Picture folder got corrupted, and I lost virtually all the images I’d stored before then. This included most of the photos I’d taken for my work at Mashable and some backups of iPhone images.

I created that new folder to keep track of all I added since then.

What all of this has in common, including my friend’s laptop loss, is that I’d failed to have any sort of redundancy. In some cases, I trusted backup to protect and preserve my images, never considered that it was a risk to delete the originals.

When I think about my friend’s laptop, I assume that he used the laptop to backup point-and-shoot photos. Probably using the same SD card over and over…

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