I lost all my photos today.

The net result is I lost about one and a half months of photos permanently (around 1000 images), about six months of originals that haven’t been burned yet to disk, lost days of work, and shot up my entire backup regiment.

I’m also one crash/corruption from losing everything.

What sucks is I actually do have a backup regimen for my photography (involving at least 4 copies of a given image floating around across separate media) and I own a few terabytes of hard drive space.

The problem is the break up has taken longer than expected—Caitlin is sitting on almost all my drives and the only computer I have that can do Aperture without barfing. I was planning on replacing this stuff after the dust settled and ended up putting some of my eggies in one basket.

That basket broke.

My Aperture backup failed—It hangs during backup over 802.11 and the drive it backs up to is one of the one’s Caitlin wants to buy and is never mounted. I thought I had backed up my photo library manually last week, but I never got around to it—I have to be on the computer Caitlin wants to buy to do this and obviously she’s using it most of the time, I was setting up for the backup and then I got distracted. My automatic backup systems has failed because the backup drives never were mounted until this weekend—the computer Caitlin wants to buy mounts them and she’s been using that removable drive system for other purposes. My latest originals to be burned were on the wrong drive—I only have personal access to two drives (out of about 20) and the other ran out of drive space so I started to move the new burnables to the drive that failed.

The last synchronization failed (file info corruption) and then I then carelessly ran DiskWarrior. It died in the middle of a volume replacement. As Murphy knows, I reminded myself to be very careful and not do a disk repair just last week—the week I thought I backed things up—because I knew things were in a fragile state.

I’d say this is a horrible coincidence, but why do I keep four(!) backups around in the first place? Because this has happened to me before!

Photos are the one thing people really can’t afford to lose.

I’m super-depressed right now. 🙁

Next time, I’m making it five.