Caught out - yes. It can happen to the best of us usually at the moment when we least expect it. What am I talking about....... computer crashes! This post is about life in the artist's studio, my studio that is, however, it's not all happy painting and wonderful pictures being produced. That would be nice but unfortunately the universe sometimes has different ideas about these things.
so a couple of weeks ago is in the process of uploading photos all of a sudden there was nothing happening when I moved my mouse. This was one of those moments when you get that sinking feeling, wondering how depleted the bank balance is going to look shortly.
Anyway my first thought was, well, perhaps the mouse needs new batteries, so I ran around getting new batteries for it, fitted them and still nothing! Zilch, Nada, Nothing! Okay - starting to get frustrated by this time because this was Monday, my Painting Day and I didn't relish spending the rest of the day trying to find out what was wrong with my computer.
I rang my computer guy, as you do, he made mutterings about hard drives and things which was even more alarming and said he'd be round late that afternoon. In the meantime I got my laptop out did the necessaries on that and my partner who is a computer programmer and very efficient handyman type, decided he would take a look at it. He, clever fellow that he is, managed to find out what the problem was.
Apparently there was some obscure thing in Windows that had managed to turn itself off so that the mouse wasn't responding any longer. Now that's something I would never have found in a million years. I'm telling you this in case to have a similar problem with your mouse because that could be a place to look before you start shelling out for expensive hard drive components and so on.
But wait, there is another moral to this story and that is, how long is it since you've backed up everything on your important hard drives. That was my first Sinking Feeling actually, it was an oh no I haven't backed up lately and what am I going to lose. So if you're a bit slack like me and haven't backed up your hard drive lately, I suggest you go and do it now.
And while we're on the subject of backing things up, do you have all your painting images stored on a separate external hard drive to your main computer as your back up. If you don't, I would suggest that you get one asap and do your backups. External 2 and 3 Terabyte hard drives are not that expensive these days and backing up can save you world of hurt later on. Another thing you can do is sign up with somewhere like Artwork Archive and keep a catalogue of all your work there. As well as this I also keep copies on external drives drives at home. The tricky thing with this though is you have to remember to make sure they are properly backed up as well. Back up the backups!! The thing is when you have your work stored with a third-party to yourself, if their business goes bust then you've lost your records.
Who would have thought an artist's life could be so complicated - I think I need a lie down now!
Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay
Image by Florian Berger from Pixabay
Image Kadira Jennings