A couple of months ago, one of my backup drives experienced a fatal failure, one of those unrecoverable ones – UGH!. This was my media drive, the place where I stored all my digital photos, videos, and music.

While I was not concerned with the music library (I can always rip them from my CD’s again) I was definitely concerned about the family photographs and videos, and specifically those that my wife and I took in the last 6 years or since my Daughter, Aurora, was born. We had a TON of photos, of every single step she took, and every new word she said.

The good news is that I had anticipated the fact that technology was bound to fail me, and so I had burned all that media into DVDs. With that being said, I was not sure about the whereabouts of one of the most important video in our library. This was a video I took when Aurora was just 5 months old (4 months and 29 days to be exact). This video is really important to me, I am not sure why, but it is.

I looked high and low for it. I reviewed every single file located on what seemed like a sea of DVDs – nothing!

Somehow I finally recalled having actually created separate Mini-CDs of the video, one of which my wife kept in a “keep-safe” box for Aurora. Well, to cut the story short I found it! Thank goodness!

Now that I had the video back in my hands I vowed to never again have any doubt of its whereabouts. I am making copies, backups, and uploading to several storage clouds, including YouTube and of course this post on my blog.

So without further ado, here is the most important clip in my library, enjoy:

This video was filmed and produced in our first home, in Centreville, VA on October 5th, 2003.

If there was anything for you to take away from this story, I hope that it is the fact that you need a back-up strategy. I know that, albeit not an overly sophisticated one, I had a strategy, and that’s what saved my data in the end. Since the drive failure I have also upgraded my SugarSync account, a file storage/back-up and sync service that has served me really well lately; check it out.