Okay, folks, a word to the wise: Back-up your data!!! As you know--or will if you read the rest of this website--we are a completely digital studio. Digital is truly my medium, perfect for the kind of artistic expression I like in my photographs. And as for convenience, it is second to none. Organization is not my strong suit, but with today's technology, files basically organize themselves. However, we recently had a very bad scare. Last year we set up a RAID drive storage system, so our data was automatically backed up on several different drives--very safe, secure, all that jazz. Well, as my luck would have it, the whole array of discs went down--statistically it would never happen. However, I am usually the exception that proves the rule. At any rate, after a few weeks of stress we eventually recovered virtually every single file from this hard disc system--but it was extremely expensive, and believe me, I don't want to live through that again. 13 days ago, we received all our files from the data recovery company on two separate drives, which we promptly backed up on other separate hard drives--no more RAID for me, thank you very much. And we have been working very busily ever since. However, today, one of the new drives we received from the data recovery company crashed. A brand new drive! They are replacing that drive with another with all the data that they recovered the first time on it, which is great, and we had other back-ups, which is even better. But my point is, this technology may be wonderful and convenient, but when it fails it can be catastrophic! So, folks, purchase lots of external hard drives to back up your main drives, and for an even better solution, CDs and DVDs are even better. Just be sure to burn two copies of everything and store one in a different location in case of a house fire or something. I have recently read that 13% of all hard drives will fail in the first year of usage. So, when it comes to your precious data, photographs, and whatever else you store on your computer, back up twice and then do it again!

All the best!--T