For years I’ve been preaching the adage that when it comes to hard drive crashes, not only as an answer to the question, “how much storage do i need?”, but also to the two types of people, those who have lost data and those who will.

Well, last week it was my turn. Again.

I was working at home, with all the proper protection, and still, in a single surge, two hard drives went kaput.

Fortunately, thank the stars, the drives were from different projects and I had backups of each. Because let me tell you, as an editor there is no worse feeling than knowing you’ll have to redo hours, or even days, of work.

What I took away from the experience is this:

1. Unless you are backing up your work, never mount both the main and backup drives at the same time. This way, if there is a catastrophic failure, you won’t burn both.
2. Even if you’ve added no new new assets during a day’s session, at the very least drag your project file to the desktop or Dropbox. At a minimum.

Here are two essential resources to help you further:

1. MediaStorm’s Guide to Backing Up
2. MediaStorm Guide to Enhancing Adobe Premiere Pro’s Auto-save Functionality

Backing up is essential. You should be obsessive. You should be fervent.

And if you think I’m being overly-cautious, imagine trying to explain to your client that everything they’ve paid for has simply disappeared.

No one wants to do that.

Be smart, backup today.