Meet Silver and Tough

LeahDay

Leah Day has been teaching online since 2009. She's the creator of the Free Motion Quilting Project, a blog filled with thousands of quilting tutorial videos. Leah has written several books including 365 Free Motion Quilting Designs, Explore Walking Foot Quilting with Leah Day, and Mally the Maker and the Queen in the Quilt.

17 Responses

  1. Shasta says:

    I learned my lesson the hard way too – lost my entire family tree! Ouch. I had a backup on diskettes, but the #7 of the 8 diskettes was bad.
    Now, I have an external hard drive, and I give CD backups that I put in another room of the house, and to my sister (another house in case something happens to this house) to keep for me.

  2. SandyQuilts says:

    It's not silly nor is it overkill …. it's smart. I too learned that lesson 2yrs ago. I also learned that anything I store on CD's and DVD's should have at least 3 copies made … they do go bad.

    Now where did you find that Seagate?

  3. Leah Day says:

    Office Max! They're running a President's day sale so many things are nicely discounted.

    It takes a bit of sting out of how expensive these little gadgets can run, but still, better be safe than sorry!

    Leah

  4. Pat says:

    I also back up my files. I should back up everything, but I don't. I back up my info. on disks, especially photos. You're right about a a safety deposit box. Important home papers, etc. should be kept in them. The only thing, I have to keep sorting and choosing what to keep in mine, and I have a large one. Really like your blog. Sorry about your computer, but just look what we learn from our mistakes. That's real important information you put on your blog. What about some quilt photos that can't be replaced? Good information from you!!!!!

  5. I started using Carbonite online back up.. so have my back up hard drive at home, and the online back up as well. So sorry that you went through this… ouch!

  6. Beth says:

    Why not try Carbonite for a backup. It is done over the Internet, it is cloud storage and encrypted and happens seamlessly in the background.

    It would be infinitely easier than going to get a HD, back up to it, and then return to safe storage.

    Lots of luck.

    Beth-Near Chicago

  7. Instead of a safety deposit box that you may or may not have time to access while out doing errands, have you thought about online storage? There are a few sites that offer lots of storage for as little as 50.00 a year. it will keep your data secure and safe and is a simple upload. Just a thought.

    I enjoy your blog and you e-book has been worth 10 times what I paid. Thank you!

  8. Becky says:

    Try carbonite.com – It stores backups off site, does it automatically (you don't have to remember to back up) and then you can reload any thing. It costs a little each month, but the way you are going, it could be a real savings.

  9. lw says:

    I've been storing family photos on two different drives, and once a year I have the photos printed professionally and put them into albums. At the back of the album goes the CD that has the photo as another back up.

    Keep in mind, though, that when I had kids at home, it was pre-digital and all of the photos were in a large cardboard box waiting for albums. I didn't get to it until the kids were grown and out of the house. I have no idea how you do so much.

  10. anaximander says:

    One of the cool things I've learned about the Seagate drives is that on the software that's included, there's *automatic* backup software – IE once a week it will mirror over any information you want.

  11. Jennifer says:

    I burn my photos to dvd twice too. Can never be too careful with baby pics.

  12. SewCalGal says:

    Oh Leah, I'm so sorry. All your beautiful videos and images lost. Heart breaking. But I'm happy you have moved on and have a new hard drive. Sadly, I'm one of those that have had this happen to too (more times than I should have). I currently have two hard drives, but I'm so parranoid I'm looking for a 3rd).

    I'd love to have a really fast wireless terradata hard drive on my network, but I don't think they make them affordably yet!

    Thanks for sharing your story. While you inspire quilters from all over the world to quilt, it is also good to inspire them to back up.

    SewCalGal
    http://www.sewcalgal.blogspot.com

  13. teresamnj says:

    I am so sorry. That really, really stinks. I had heard about an online back-up site, Carbonite, a few days before we were moving from Florida back to NJ, and thank goodness I signed up, but not even a day after that, my computer crashed. I would have lost everything. I am definitely going to get an external drive too, though. You can never be too safe.

  14. So sorry to hear about your hard drive situation. I keep two hard drives on my desk. One that is the "active" hard drive and one that is the backup. I keep the backup one unplugged from everything except when I'm backing up because we have a lot of power surges here. I keep another backup hard drive in a fireproof safe and alternate it in and out with the one on my desk. I would love to use something like Carbonite, but from what I understand, you can not back up from an external drive, only from your main computer.

  15. Amby says:

    It is not over kill at all! Several years ago I lost my computer to a crash and a lot of Genealogy research it had taken me years to collect, lucky I had given a copy of most of it to a friend to have out of the house;
    Now I use 2 external drives and backup everything I want to keep to Mozy.Com.

    I have had one computer crash since then and was able to recovery everything from Mozy or the External drives.

    You can never be to careful.

    I love your Blog and Utube sites and think you are a great teacher

    Thanks
    Joyce
    Baton Rouge

  16. In my former life, I was an email archivist for the government and you might want to consider one more backup safety, and that's some kind of offsite storage in case of a fire or flood. I am a quilt designer and once every quarter, I burn a copy of all my new files to DVD's and send them to my son's house for safekeeping. I also double save everything I do on my working files; once to my hard drive and once to a 12GB flash drive. I also have duplicate laptops that have the same programs so that if one is acting up, I can just pick up my flash drive and move it to another computer.

    You can never be too obsessive about backing up your work.

    Geri

  17. Katie says:

    I agree too. It's not overkill. Good luck with your hard drives! 🙂

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