I had a little minor computer related crisis this morning that caused a hissy fit on my part. It was really a result of my bad work flow habit, but none the less, it pissed me off. I had just written the intro to my folio, Humans. Spend maybe an hour on it, but I was pleased with it. It was a word doc and I saved it and moved on to the next intro. This is where I got stupid. My work flow was to save a doc, then erase it writing a new one in the same format, then doing a save as for the saving the second doc. Upon finishing the second intro I accidently saved, not save as, the second doc, overwriting the first. When I realized what I had done, I tried everything to recover it. Tried calling my techie, command Z, consulting the almighty Google. Nada… I fumed, believing that first draft was brilliant and I would never be so elegant in rewriting. I thought about waiting to rewrite tomorrow, but in the end I accepted my mistake and opened a new document, knowing some of my brilliance was still lingering somewhere in my grey matter. I actually think the second draft is better, but I have nothing to compare to. I used to use Apple’s Time Machine as a means of backing up. Not sure why I don’t anymore, it would have saved my butt. Just go back in time and recover the original. Only once did something like that happen to my photographs. I erased a disc before it was backed up. My dad and his naval buddies from their reunion died a second death. After that I made sure that would never happen again. I have back ups now everywhere, well not online, but I don’t trust the damn cloud anyway. But I will never be without copious backup of all my work. It seems sometimes the best learning lessons are the most painful.
