Don't just Transfer, BACK UP!

A great lesson learned, and I'm glad it wasn't too painful: you might remember the layout and story I told here a few days ago, about growing up in Los Angeles, and the layout I created about it.

After I completed it, I was distressed to see how bad it looked online, particularly the black wording against the red background on the right side of the page. I posted a thread in the message board at 2Peas, asking for some advice about saving the file, and what might be causing the problem. I had saved it at a high quality, and normally my layouts look quite crisp online, especially on my blog- (when the layout is clicked and opened in a new window). I got some pretty good suggestions, so I went back to try to save it in some other ways. One of the things that occurred to me, was the problem might be the red, since the layout looked decent everywhere else. In the course of going back to my original, layered Photoshop file, I inadvertently overrode the file, and I lost my high quality, layered file. This rarely, if ever happens to me, I try to be very careful when saving files.

I am pretty good about making sure I utilize my external hard drives. I have 3 of them, and my usual work-flow is to keep a copy of each layout as a layered PSD file, then transfer it in a day or two, to the EHD that I've designated for my scrapbook layouts. But this happened during the final editing, so it was GONE. I was heartbroken. If the layout had been practically perfect, I probably would have just shrugged and moved on. But I wanted to fix that red, and there was no way to do it with just a medium sized jpeg. But then I remembered! I had been working on this layout for a few weeks, off and on. I worked on it in Hong Kong, and I recalled that some time during my trip, I had hooked up my 500G EHD, which I use for Time Machine (the Mac's back-up system), and I had backed up my system. So, that would mean that the file was somewhere in Time! Last night, I took the time to finally figure out what Time Machine was all about (I've been a Mac user for 15 years or so, but until I got my new MacBook Pro a year ago, I had never used Time Machine). Even though I had it since about February, I had only just in the past few months, finally activated it and started regular back-ups. To make a long story somewhat shorter, I found the file! It wasn't complete, and still required a couple of hours of work to re-extract the large photo, and re-type the journaling and make a few other additions, but I was thrilled that I could fix the big problem and make it better. I also noticed some glaring typos that I hadn't caught before. Whew, I hate those misspelled words and poor punctuation!

So, the lesson: an EHD might not be all you will need to store those extra files. You should also have some sort of REAL back-up system: online or internal, like Time Machine. I've certainly learned my lesson!

I hope my layout looks better, I think it's more fun with the new background! (click on the layout to see a closer view!)