Things haven’t gone too well on the technical front just lately. The other day my computer got wobbly legs and staggered about bit, then made a valiant attempt at recovery. It then went into self presevation mode, sulked a lot and then wouldn’t talk to me at all!
Oh dear me thought. But having been through these times before I was more prepared for it happenning again. I have two network hard drives where I keep backups of everything. I have various USB drives too that come in handy too. Now I’m not the best in the world a keeping things tidy and while I had everything on the network drives my filing systems are atrocious. So finding all the program set up files to perform re-installs has been a challenge to say the least. As for data files . . . . . . the machine has been in heavy use for nearly four years and it has been a real headache finding everything.
I now have a shiny new pewter and have got most of the important stuff up and running and have downloaded and installed 64 bit versions of Lightroom and Photoshop. Now I have to get all my plug-ins back in place.
I should be back to normal soon and hopefully the flood of OS updates will slow to a normal trickle soon too.
So it’s not just a case of backup, backup, backup, but keep some semblance of organisation in storage systems as well. I will start with the best of intentions but I just know that won’t last 🙂
athyfotographic 
It’s the situation we all dread. Glad you seem to have performed a heroic rescue. It’s so easy to let the organization slip. It’s only a tiny slip to begin with and then the organization starts to crumble and it really is a helluva job recovering and remembering what you did with everything. My situation is compounded by having two machines. Double the trouble. Thanks for sharing, Posts like this are always a kick up the backside, a ‘wake up’ call saying: ‘it could be you’. As it happens I was supposed to be buying a new external drive today – never made it to the store – it’s a priority for tomorrow.