I’ve just been giving this site a makeover. As I was doing that I remembered what happened to a photographer friend/client a few months back. I won’t name him and I hope he doesn’t mind me telling you what happened.
He has a website where he showcases his work. All his photos are stored on high capacity external hard drives with (fortunately) the originals kept on CDs and DVDs and locked in a safe.
He spent a happy afternoon uploading some photos to his website. To do this he used Filezilla, which is ftp software for uploading files directly to your website.
For some reason he couldn’t explain he decided that the left-hand side of his screen (all the files on his external hard drive) looked cluttered, so he decided to “delete the files from Filezilla”. It took nearly an hour, apparently. It was only then that he realised that he had deleted the files from his hard drive.
He panicked and rang me. I told him not to touch the hard drive, but to take it to the local computer store who might be able to retrieve the contents using file recovery software. Unfortunately, by the time he’d rung me he had tried to replace some of the photos by uploading them from some of the CDs stored in his safe.
I can only imagine how he must have felt when he realised what he had done. Can YOU imagine how long it would have taken him to trawl through the CDs in his safe, find ALL the photos he’d deleted and reupload them to his hard drive?
If he’d had an online backup service in place, he could have retreived ALL of his photos, correctly ordered in their folders and just downloaded them to his hard drive. Yes, downloading that much data would have taken time, but he could have spent that time drinking a few cups of tea, walking the dog or having dinner, rather than spending hours upon hours sifting through the CDs in his safe.