Hello! So, over the past few months I've been busy as a bee working on the re-design of our Lulubelles website {which should be ready for it's world wide launch later this month!! :-) yipee!} As bad timing would have it, during the process of meeting deadlines, my computer hard drive crashed! Gone-so. AND I hadn't backed it up since December 11, 2010 so I lost ALL of my pictures of Hadley's 1st birthday, Christmas, and the beginning months of the new year *tears*. I'll use this time to insert my public service announcement - ALWAYS KEEP YOUR EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE PLUGGED IN AND SET FOR AUTOMATIC BACKUPS! If you are a picture crazed person as I am, this is a devastating loss! The folks at Apple replaced my hard drive and wrapped my old one up in a little coffin of sorts and sent me on my way. The guy there said they actually aren't allowed to give back the old, broken hard drive but he felt sorry for me so slid it in my computer box...in hopes that I could take it to a doctor for reincarnation. It couldn't have been the dramatic scene I created at Apple mourning the loss of my pictures that caused the pity!?! If you are thinking "I can't leave it plugged in because I need to plug in my printer, camera, iphone charger, etc."...buy a USB hub. This will give you more usb ports and will allow for a permanent home for your external hard drive.
Shortly after 'the loss', I was going about my business trying to work extra fast in order to not delay the website and my computer popped up an error message with some technical jargon that basically said "your hard drive space is full and you can't do anything until you fix it". I started deleting stuff like crazy but nothing made a difference. I then did some good ol' Google research and found a free application called Disc Inventory X which shows you exactly what files are taking up the most space and where they are located. The big culprit for me was video! I didn't even think I had taken that much home video, but it's such a space hog that a little takes up a lot. So, I bought a new larger external hard drive and moved all of my video and photos to that and then a 2nd external hard drive is still plugged in at all times and backs up my computer hard drive and my video/photo hard drive. Something else I learned was that if you are a good girl and you do backup your computer, it's up to you to check how much space is left on your external hard drive. If it fills up, it automatically starts deleting the oldest files - GASP - without asking your permission! That was a shocker to me. To find out how much space yours has, find the icon (on a MAC, it's located at your left side bar) and right click on it then click 'get info' and it will tell you the capacity yours has and the availability.
As I was doing my research it looked like there were a lot of people experiencing the same issues because of so many people using DSLR cameras, whose picture files are bigger than a traditional point and shoot camera, and taking more videos with their phones and smaller, more user friendly video cameras. Because of this, I thought I'd share my story with you so that you can be proactive before you go through the major headaches that I have over the past couple of months! So, the moral of the story is Back It Up Baby!!
Xo,
Natalie
