An ISC's worst nightmare - losing the project files just before the release!

Preamble

There is a first time for everything. All my life I have never faced a situation where I have faced a data loss. All my life I have taken it for granted that a computer will never crash on me! Worst still I have not envisaged that my data will ever get corrupt and get unusable or suddenly disappear.


A nightmare coming true!

But yesterday, it happened. I wanted to send the project that I was working on to my client and as usual, I compressed my project using WinRAR (it is an evaluation copy, but not expired still) and mailed it as an attachment. I was happy that I was able to send the files to my client as I had told them the day before that I will be sending an updated version.

I was kind of surprised to get a response telling me that the file I sent was corrupt and a request for a resend. When I went and checked my hard drive, I realized the file that I had sent was only 1kb. Knowing this can't be, I deleted it and zipped the folder again. To my utter disbelief, the new archive was also only 1 kb. I opened the archive to see that it contained the root folder and the sub folder, but no files within the folders.

So I went to my original project folder just to verify as by this time a fear was building up within me! And I was right. My original project folder was the same. It had the root folder and the sub folder, but no files and no sub folders within the sub folder! I was stumped. I had lost my data and worst still, I had no backups! I had lost 2 weeks of paid up work that I had done for my client!


Murphy's Law Applied

Now that Murphy's Law had been realized on the most important piece of data that was in my computer, a tad bit too late you may say, I started to look for the solutions to avoid such situation in the future. As the saying goes, it is better late than never. So I devised a two stage process.

I need to run a CVS or SVN server to enable me to maintain versions of the projects that I am working on. This will help me roll back incase any of the modifications that I do on a project results in bugs or makes the solution unusable or unstable.

Secondly, I need to backup my data offline, in a more secure offsite location. Preferably to some online backup server. So I can access my files from anywhere and from any computer.