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!
This has been a public service announcement from Mochimochi Land.
I adore this pattern. :)
Thank you for the reminder. :)
I usually leave it up to my computer geek of a husband (self proclaimed by him) but I know he doesn’t back up often enough.
I don’t want to think about the last time I backed up. Definitely something I need to do!
“Backing up my computer” is a foreign language to me, I should probably do it….
Thanks for the reminder!
I’m very non-techie…. but my brother installed something that I think is called “Time Machine” on my computer and it automatically backs things up. That is the ultimate. Perhaps it’s only available for Apple? But, then I don’t know why anyone buys anything but an Apple! ; )
My husband and I are fanatics about this. Not only do we back up regularly to an external drive kept in a separate (hidden) location from the computer, but every two months we back up every computer in the house to drives we keep in our safety deposit box. That way we have the ability to recover from a fire or other natural disaster, not just a computer crash.
Buying an external hard drive was one of the best things we did. It was a shame we didn’t realize that until *after* a crash, but that was in the days where I already burned the photos on CDs too, so it wasn’t as big a loss as it could have been.
Thanks for the PSA! I’m realizing we haven’t backed up our computer in a while, as far as I know. We have an external hard drive (a few, actually) and try to do it regularly, but it’s never often enough!
Just saw a re-Tweet of your Doctors. Is this a pattern you will be releasing soon? (Hope, hope)
Lestersmama: I made these as a gift for my friend who’s getting married. But the response on Twitter has been pretty big, so maybe they can become a pattern…
As I don’t follow twitter, I just visit every once in a while I didn’t know you had done a Dr Who for a friend Anna. I went back to see your pics but they aren’t loading for some reason. If the link doesn’t get fixed do you think you could post the pics on your site or facebook?
Please :), did I not say please?
I’m hoping to keep it a little bit under wraps until my friend gets the little guys (I sure hope she’s not on Twitter), but I’ll post pics soon!
I totally understand! :)