Lesson Learned the Hard Way

I have a lesson that I have learned the hard way, I learned it with the loss of 12 years worth of my photography, with the only surviving work being the limited amount that I had curated and shared on my recently started Flickr page.  12 years worth of passion and work that I can never get back, and
that I can never truly replaced.  It all happened when the hard drive on my laptop decided to destroy itself, in the time span of one day, while the laptop was on but I was not actively using it, leaving me with a hard drive that is unrecoverable.  That did not seem like a disaster on its own, as I had all of my work backed up on Microsoft One Drive (which is really convenient to use and nicely allowed me to access my work from any computer that I was on) but that is when the true loss happened.  What happened what that i upped my level of storage as I was sitting right at my limit, but during the process of the upgrade of storage all of my photography was I lost with no way to get it back.  12 years worth of passion and art with no way to recover it and no way to really replace it.  Now all that I have left is a limited amount of work that I have on my Flickr page, but I had so much raw work that I have not curated and edited for posting for sharing with the public. 



It was this loss that has taught me a lesson that I would have much rather learned in another way, and that is to not trust just one way of backing up your work (be it photography writting or what every you passion is) that the cloud is not the only place that you should store it, that you should also store it on another physical medium (or more then one) like a external hard drive or better yet both, as you never know when your primary storage and a back up will fail you at the same time, leaving you empty handed, unless you have more backups.