Data Back ups and Murphy's Law

After the valiant struggle to recover the artwork from a hard drive that died quickly... resulted in some good lessons. The back up files were corrupt. The time machine and pseudo raid array were recording folder locations that no longer were vital. Even the hard archives I had burned to blu ray discs did not contain the precious files. My efforts ended when the data recovery company asked if they should just dispose of the drive or charge me to mail it back!

So what this showed me is to verify the things that are being recorded. No client data or work was lost thankfully. It spurred me into researching different solutions and to really sort what is priority vs clutter.

The other thing learned as i went to begin creating new works is that I had relied on memory

for the procedures. Yes it was time to refresh and learn from tutorials. While viewing I wrote notes of the important steps. This becomes the workflow. If there is ever a bottleneck I can review the procedure - which is now in an easy to find document.

I am also utilizing cloud based storage as another avenue. Paying for Office 360 and ICloud; I may as well add more redundency. One exciting aspect is finally learning how to take my sketchy drawings and make them into clean vector based graphics. In the past I relied on Photoshop and other bitmap solutions. Using Illustrator can open the path to some workflows on other projects.

Here are a couple made within this past 24 hours.. Hope you enjoy and any critiques or advice is always welcome!