📝 A $500 lesson in data management

Oof that was a scary day.

I was working late at night, finished up my project with my hard drive working perfectly fine.

I woke up the next morning, drive not working at all. Panic ensued. I could plug it in, but my computer wouldn’t read it.

I didn’t know why. The panic continued. Sweating started. I started looking for all the solutions I could.

This drive contained everything that I was working on. I didn’t think about it failing at the time.

All I could find online was that the drive was recoverable, but I’d have to buy a software to do that. There wasn’t enough space on my local drive to recover the whole external drive, so I had to go buy a new drive.

$500 later, I was able to recover all my project files and reset my damaged hard drive.

That day taught me a valuable lesson about keeping everything backed up consistently.

Every editor needs to do this or risk losing everything.

Here’s how I learned to better manage my project data after that day…

Dropbox and Google Drive are your friends

I immediately started storing more in my cloud service providers. They are a cheap way to keep all your data off of a local hard drive. It adds a layer of security.

I even found a separate cloud service provider that works really well for one of my clients and I called LucidLink. They are a great cloud service provider who will let you stream your files from the cloud without having to download them. Check them out if you’re looking for a powerful cloud collaboration tool.

Get Multiple Drives or a NAS

You need more than one hard drive. I started labeling one an archival drive and one an active projects drive. That way all my projects are stored in multiple different places in case one gives out.

If you have the money and want to do this more effectively, get a NAS storage device. To my knowledge Synology has the best ones.

NAS (Network Attached Storage) works by automatically backing-up your data across multiple drives to keep it safe. If one fails, the others kick in and you won’t lose your data.

ChronoSync is your accountability partner

ChronoSync is a tool for Mac that I’d recommend any editor get. It allows you to schedule syncs between your drives.

If you keep your drives plugged it, it takes the mental load of off having to remember to back up your projects. You just set it and forget it. It’ll do all the syncing and archiving for you.

It’s an amazing tool and has saved me a ton of time in my work flow.

The day I had to drop $500 to redo was frightening and was a valuable lesson. What you read above are three things I implemented in my data management system immediately after that day.

If there is something you do to keep your data safe, I’d love to hear it so feel free to respond to this email. :)