Mochimochi Land PSA: Back up your Files!

Almost every day, I hear from someone who is going through a crisis: their hard drive crashed, and they’ve lost all of their PDF knitting patterns!

Sometimes these knitters are hesitant to request new download links for patterns that they had bought from my shop, but I’m happy to help out—it takes almost no time and effort on my part to look up the purchases and reactivate the links. But I’m sure missing Mochimochi Land patterns are the least of their troubles, what with the precious photos, emails, and other data that we all trust our computers with. Since we’ve heard this sad story again and again over the past few years, Error and I decided to do a little public service announcement today:

Back up your computer right now! And do it regularly.

It may seem like a pain, but it’s not like the pain of losing everything. I know from experience: a few years back, my hard drive crashed and I lost entire patterns that I was in the process of designing, along with lots of photos and music. I had backed up my computer, but not within the previous six months or so. The one bright spot was a nice customer service person at iTunes who didn’t ask questions when I requested the music I’d bought from them. It’s that experience that makes me eager to help out my own customers in crisis.

As I’m typing up this blog post, right this minute, I’m backing up my computer to an external hard drive. I suggest you do it too!