Eastern Sierra,Fall Colors,Sierra,Sierra Nevada,aspens,tree] – I would not want to lose this photo

As a photographer, my photos are important to me; they can’t be replaced !  So, I backup, or so I thought.  I also work in high tech and know that computers and storage fail.  I thought I was OK with having a RAID 6 was enough backup (requires 3 failures to lose information).  I was wrong, a computer crash killed the RAID 6.  It took 6 months and $4,700 to recover about 80% of the photos.  Lost were some incredible photos of dolphin jumping in the surf, right next to the shore.

After that incident, I acquired a Network Attached Storage (NAS) from Synology that is separate from the computer for backup.  The NAS is RAID 6, the files on the computer are on a RAID 5 (2 failures to lose information) with a backup from the computer to the NAS.  Is this enough backup?

But, what if there were a fire that took out the house? So, I now, also use Backblaze to back up the photos to the cloud.  It has taken 15 months to upload all the files to BackBlaze.  I sleep better.

Well I thought that I had backed up enough.  The website, Patrick Lynch Photography, was backed up as was the blog site on by the hosting company on a weekly and monthly basis.

Unfortunately an automatic WordPress update  played havoc and the blog could not be restored.   The backup plan at the hosting site did not work.  I have to recreate the whole blog site from scratch!

The moral of the story is that  not all backups are the same; just because the photos are backed up, doesn’t mean anything else is….

Because I am having to recreate the blog from scratch I will be republishing past blog articles.