The situation
OK, here is the situation. All of my artwork, scripts, writing and other personal data have always been kept on a 4GB USB drive clipped to my key ring. This has worked for a long time. Knowing how important all this stuff is to me and the potential for losing stuff this small, I set up a routine for backing up my USB drive to a 500GB external drive. In turn, that external drive would echo its data to a second 500GB external. All good stuff that I set up while I was still living in Hong Kong.
Then came the move back the United States. And finding a house. And buying cars for me and the wife. And having a baby. And moving and unpacking. Not only did the frequency of updates slow down because of all of this, but something even more sinister happened. Since I wasn’t paying as much attention to the site and the updates, I also forgot about the backups.
And as fate would have it I lost my 4GB USB drive a little over a month ago.
I was pissed. I had only used it less than 24 hours previous to realizing that it was missing. Then I was depressed as it had a lot of personal information on the drive. Enough that I really hope that the drive is destroyed instead of in the hands of someone who would want to use that information against me. Then I checked my backups.
That’s when I got really depressed.
The last backup I did of the drive was on Halloween of 2008. Enough to capture the data for my now infamous Halloween comics which is good. But considering everything else, I had lost a lot of data. I guess I should count myself lucky that I even had that backup but losing six months worth of art, assets and scripts is a huge blow to me. I don’t have a lot of time anymore to work on the things I want to work on so this really hit me hard.
So now you know why the updates have stopped here at A Little Scary. All is not lost, but I’m going to have to do a lot of work to get things where they need to be. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to start posting comics again either later this spring or at worst this summer. Earlier if I can get my crap together and start working on that instead of drowning my sorrows in Fallout 3.
Don’t count me out yet.
Yeah… the other trick to verifying your backups… just because they run doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. I try to check mine every few weeks or months. I forget though (and since none have failed yet I’m hoping I’ll be safe – yay RAID).
Sorry you lost your stuff… that really does suck… maybe you should set a routine to also make a backup of it each time you plug it into your home computer? That way it’ll backup each time you access it.
Sorry to here about that I like the strip and hope to see you continue in the future, You are good at it,