Always save your work. Redundancy is essential.
I have a system in place to protect my studio projects. They are saved on a cloud server and backed up to two, yes two, separate hard drives. This doesn’t mean that problems can’t occur. About a year ago, I was working on a song called “Idea 9.” After finishing the track, I discovered a problem and a nagging need to tweak a part. When I opened the project backup, all of the audio was missing except for the kazoo solo and vocals. It was a great kazoo solo but this did not solve my problem. My redundancies were also missing the audio. The files must have been lost before being backed up on two, yes two, separate hard drives.
I have been a daily blogger for a while. I previously used Wordpress to host my ramblings. I needed to make a change. So, here I am on Substack, which is where you are reading this. When I started my practice of daily writing, I typed into a word processing app and then copied it to Wordpress. This provided redundancy. At some point, I stopped typing the initial draft. My words went straight to Wordpress. The old site will cease to exist on December 1. That is tomorrow. Approximately 1200 old posts will disappear. When did I get lazy and stop backing up my words? How many posts would be lost forever? I have no idea. It’s been a frantic process to get it all saved. I still have 260 more posts to get copied today. And before you say anything, yes, there was an export feature. It provided a very large file that allegedly contained the entire website but I seem to have misplaced it and I neglected to back it up.