Words and Light

By now, I would have blogged my Day 11 entry, and would be writing up my Day 12 entry, for the 30-day challenge.

But because my portable hard drive crashed 15 minutes after I finished editing and submitting Missouri Grand Prix photos for The Columbia Missourian early this afternoon, those blog entries will have to wait. The photos for those entries — and for many, many other projects — are stored only on that hard drive, since it functioned as my scratch/working disk.

In the meantime, I am:

• trying not to cry;
• doing what I can to recover my data;
• learning, the hard way, that I should back up my data much more often (I have another external hard drive that I use for backup);
• trying not to cry;
• working one of my Sunday shifts at The Missourian, which qualifies the past three days as a full weekend of photo-editing; and
• trying not to cry.

If I can get those files recovered, I’ll blog Day 11 and Day 12.

If not — oh, well.

My chief concern is not that I might have lost two days of the 30-day challenge but rather that I regain the photos I’ve taken this semester and ensure that working files of several projects are still intact. None of the data I’ve lost has extremely personal information or constitutes a security concern — it’s just a lot of work that might be lost forever.

We’ll see what happens.

Let this be a lesson to anyone and everyone who doesn’t back up data on a weekly basis.