Have you backed up your important files today? No? Well, you should do that. Twice.

That moment when you realise that you forgot to back up a whole year’s worth of raw design files.. and now they are lost forever. #icannot

— Deborah (@adoredee) July 10, 2014

My lovely lovely boyfriend built me a computer for my birthday and I decided to give my mother my old laptop. I dutifully backed up files, and then asked lovely boyfriend man to reinstall windows on it. But! I hadn’t backed up everything, only the finished products and more importantly not the raw files of certain complex design projects.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had drama with saving files, the first was in 2007 when I lost years worth of design files due to a mishap with an external hard drive. I was devastated and it took me a long time to be able to design stuff again. It was incredibly painful.

Then I lost the memory card for my phone and vowed to take cloud storage more seriously! I use all sorts of cloud storage sites now, but the one I rely on is OneDrive as now with my Office 365 account I get 1TB of storage.

Bleugh, after a kind friend helped me pick a program and explained how the recovery process works, I spent all of the morning trying to recover files that were lost. I’ve got about 60% back, and only one project is lost forever, which is pretty good. I know I’ve said it before, but never again. Losing files is really the worst.