DDC Team Rider Harry Brumer still has it. Stockholm, Sweden, Summer of Love, 2005.

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Lesson learned.

So my hard drive died. Or, had a “fatal hiccup” of some sort and just sort of “shit out in the most unfortunate of times.”

See, I had all the dudes here from the mag and we were slammin’ out pages full force and this cataclysm happens.

And so it goes. I handled it all pretty well, and had everything backed up to about a month ago, but, could have lost all the work done for the mag, as well as the last month’s pile of activity. And shit, what a month it was. Lot of progress could have been lost.

TECH TALK: My hard drive in my dual 1.8mHz was coming up on it’s 2nd year of service, and well, I guess this calamity was bound to happen at some point. Like any responsible—yet naïve—“backer-upper” I was in a mode where I was backing it all up every 30 days or so. And now, as I look back on that, I cringe at how reckless that was. I don’t care if it’s a “Project of the Year” catalog mechanical that took me a month to fine-tune or a piddly little piece of email, that file has to be backed up somewhere and now.

So I lost some stuff. Maybe one percent was lost. Oddly enough, only from recent projects. Which leads me to believe the “ring” or “channel” was damaged in whatever altercation that went down, was on the ring most recently written. The brunt of the hit involved large, lumbering Photoshop files that were for double page spreads. Big ol’ bastards with a bunch of layers, saved as tiffs to keep all my treatments intact. So I lost some of those, and those crucial layer treatments…but, did still have some flattened versions, and hell, in one case, extracted a photo out of a PDFx1a file. Wow. Phew. Saved my ass on that one. Yes, this is pretty technical, but, as a designer working on larger and larger projects, I gotta know my shit, and, most importantly, have to have some protocol in place to keep this precious date backed up.

So I went and settled a new machine.

Dual 2.7mHz, 4.5gb of RAM with dual 250gb internal hard drives.

Settled.

I’ve got those two drives raiding away, backing up data, and, one more external 250gb hard drive for the weekly “just in case” backup, as well as a 80gb external for iTunes, and, one more 250gb external for archiving old projects. Phew. Lots of shit plugged in and getting’ mean.

Now, back to the projects.