Today, I drove from Toronto to Montreal and back (that’s 12 hours driving the car – good that I took the 3 litre Bluetec turbo diesel).

Here: for once I’ll make it easy for my Australian and New Zealand readers:

What I want to talk about is this: I brought my secondary photo disk with me, in the car.

Why?

Well… what if in my absence my home had been burgled, or had burned down?

Did I mention backups?

Yes I did: search for “backup” here and read all the posts. And you may really want to do that. Hands up everyone, who has a good backup right now? And who will make one tomorrow?

Thought so.

You know, every hard disk dies, and I keep telling everyone that. Case in point: my own Macbook Pro’s hard disk died in the middle of December’s Santa shoot. I had to go out the same morning to buy a new MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

Fortunately, I had backups of all important files. I make several levels of backups:

• I use a backup strategy for photos as outlined in posts here (search: two external hard disks).
• I use DropBox as an additional layer
• I also use Time Machine as an additional layer.

I know I am preaching, but it’s for your own good. Your hard disk could also die – right now, or in fifteen minutes. Are your files safe?

This is worth stressing especially for photographers.  Once your disk dies, it is dead – and all your images are gone. So please – I don’t want to hear any more readers ask me what to do after their disk dies! Make tonight your backup day.