Mercury is the god of communications, rogues, thieves, and social media gurus

Normally, you’d think backing up your data was a safety precaution, akin to flossing your teeth, eating right, and looking both ways before crossing the street. Normally, you’d be right.

But what about when you and your existing site have to part ways? What if your web host goes under, leaving a big hole in the internet where your site used to be? What if you want to move to another server? What if your DNS starts PMSing and your website is MIA?

Your backups can be your guarantee of freedom and mobility.

If you have an up-to-date backup, you can relax. Okay, you can pour yourself a stiff Diet Coke and THEN relax, because you haven’t really lost anything; it’s just temporarily offline, suitcased, and you can put it anywhere you want: new address or old. Once you get your new web home, you can simply upload your old contents and you’re up and running! Try re-creating a lost website from traces left on Google Cache and the Wayback Machine and you’ll never again forget to do your weekly (or more frequent) backups!

And yes, sadly, that is the voice of experience talking. If you’re not the detail-oriented type, you can always have a qualified professional take care of it for you. Now, gee…where would you find one of those?

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Vancouver artist and photographer Sharon Burns recently showed her latest works at the Interurban Gallery downtown at Hastings and Carrall streets. She’s previously exhibited at public and private galleries from the Vancouver Art Gallery to the Gallery Gachet, and her work is both critically respected and popular.

And now, it’s gone.

If you saw the show at the Interurban, congratulations; you saw the only extant record of three years of work. Here’s how it happened:

Nobody likes moving house much, and moving house single-handedly they like even less. Burns had to move house, didn’t have any friends free that night, and decided, since it was a small job, to dispense with a moving company and hire some freelance labour. All appeared to go well, and she’d been settled into her new apartment several months when she had occasion to double-check her photo-storage hard drive for an image for the upcoming show.

You know what happened then.

The loss of a hard drive, whether due to “the confusion of moving” or to some more sinister cause, is always a blow, but if you’ve got a backup of your data somewhere else, it’s a surmountable blow. In contrast to the common assumption, online data storage can often be more secure than offline storage, and more flexible as well. Don’t get caught out like this, losing three years of work. But then, if you’re reading this blog, you probably know you’ve got some safety options; use them!