My main recording drive failed on me this weekend. It was only a couple of months old. Although I am pretty fanatical about backing up, it croaked in between the time I recorded a session on it (on Saturday afternoon), and when my automatic backup was scheduled (1 AM on Sunday morning). As a result, I lost the entire session. Ugh!

This has caused me to rethink my backup strategy, which relied too much on those daily automatic backups. Although I’ll continue to have the software perform automatic backups once a day, I’m also going to run a manual backup at the end of every session. Had I done so Saturday when my session finished, I wouldn’t have lost a day’s work.

This incident also reinforced to me the utter fragility and unpredictable nature of hard drives, in general. The drive that went down had a name-brand mechanism and should have lasted several years, not a couple of months. Needless to say, it’s under warranty and will be replaced by the manufacturer. However, it goes to show that you should never depend on the reliability of your drive, and you should always backup, preferably as soon as you’ve finished recording.

For more on backup strategies, see the article “Better Safe than Sorry,” in the May, 2006 issue of EM.