In the months after my son was born mid last year the hordes of family visiting from interstate got to have pictures taken by a decidedly average in-house photographer. People posed, I shot, there was general merriment.
I have been using lightroom for a while now and I would download photos from the memory card onto my hard drive and then import them into lightroom. Now is when this story goes pear shaped,during this period I selected the new photos and imported into lightroom from the card looked and decided there were some good shots and that was all, never transferred the files to the computer. I then purchased a new laptop and copied the entire hard drive into a folder on an external hdd and continued on my merry little way.
Well since then my father in law passed away, we bought a new house and the general family stuff I had never got around to going through the squillion photos I had taken after the little guy was born. However at some stage my memory card filled up, so thinking I had imported the photos into lightroom, the photos would be in a folder somewhere on the external hard drive I very casually deleted all the photos and started again.
Then the wife decided to start a photo book of the first year. This day did not go well for me. Firstly in her search for the photos she discovered I had forgotten to mention I had purchased a K5 to keep my K7 company (they look the same, she will never notice right?), but more so that she could not find the photos, I looked through external hard drive before realising what I had done...........(yes she cried) I made her sad and disappointed as there can never be a reshoot.
Thankfully I had edited and uploaded to smugmug all the initial photos of our parents in the hospital and the photo session we has once back at home. Sadly all the ones of the rest of the family are history.
I have since this fateful day implemented RAID 1 external storage for photos and documents to couple with the existing time machine setup. I have also totally revised my photography workflow to incorporate local and net based storage (for the really good ones).
I have since then done a very considerable amount of playing around in lightroom and have discovered a lot of really cool features and a lot of basics I am not sure how I missed to begin with.
Hopefully this story will save some one from either making the totally moronic mistake I did, or will encouraging better backups as the same outcome could have happened with a hdd failure.
p.s. I took a few ripper shots of the little guy the other night and all is forgiven
p.p.s. sorry if this is in the wrong section mods.