This cartoon of me was created for my book, The Chronicles of Zee & Zoey, for Chapter 25, "The Whole Truth & Nothing But The Truth."

We’ve all been in circumstances where you walk into a room and you don’t have to be a detective to know something is wrong…. Yeah, anyhow, welcome to my edition of “True Horror Stories of the Cats Living in my House!”

Intrigued? The title of the post implies online data backup –what the heck does that have to do with my cats and is this going to be one of those weird, off-topic types of stories that has no relevance to my readers?  That’s initially what I thought when my  buddy Caroline Golon of Romeo the Cat contacted me and asked if I wanted to do a post about a company called SurDoc that offers automatic online data backup.

Well, truth be told, about a year ago, I came home from work to what we can now laugh about (sort of), but at the time was a bona-fide DISASTER. Dan and I literally have thousands of pictures –not just of the cats, but of the family and for other jobs that we consult for. Some of these pictures are invaluable to our livelihoods and some are precious photos of certain priceless moments in our life that can never be recaptured again.

On the floor, clinging to life with a dull, whirring noise, was Dan’s backup external hard drive where he stored all these images. Because the memory space for these pictures was so significant, he stored them on the external drive, rather than his computer, and that was our security plan. Nobody took into account the cats…

Despite Zoey's guilty look, we honestly have no idea who knocked the external hard drive on the floor...

Apparently one of them was playing and knocked the external drive to semi-unconsciousness onto the floor. Nothing Dan did could revive the machine and he was doing his level best not to panic. My heart just fell on the floor with the crippled drive and I tried to remain calm. Obviously yelling at the cats was not a viable solution and  it was not going to bring the drive or the pictures back to life. It was an accident and no matter how hard you try to reason with a cat, they actually do not understand what it means when you say “Bad kitty, do you realize what you just did? Our whole life is ruined and it is your fault.” (This is where your cat looks at you, blinks, and daintily washes its paws)

This picture of Rolz sums it up quite nicely...

It was our fault. We should have had an online storage backup plan in place and then we never would have had to go through what was to follow. We became rationale enough to contact a recovery system company to retrieve the files, but there was no guarantee that they could restore the images to their original state, or that they could be recovered at all, or that they would not be damaged or corrupted.

Thank you to the recovery Gods, they were able to restore the images – all of them. But, the process was costly and the images came back in some weird computer code. All the meticulous file folders and names for each image was lost and Dan spent weeks recreating his photo library. So, Caroline had a very valid point – cats do cause accidents (raise of hands from all of you that has had your cat walk over your keyboard causing you to lose that document you were working on BEFORE you saved it) and for many of us bloggers who rely on pictures to tell a story, a backup service like SurDoc could be a life saver.

I know that I personally back up to USB sticks (which work one day, then mysteriously the next day, they don’t work which is supremely frustrating) and I also do a weekly back up on an external drive. However, even with that, it is not fool proof and I think we have all learned in light of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, that the weather pattern is changing across the country and that natural disasters can happen when and where we least expect them, causing many to lose everything that is precious to them  in an instant, including computer equipment and photographs.

Long story, short, the relevance to you dear readers? Whether you use your digital pictures for a business, or just for personal use, they can become permanently lost and that might not be a risk you want to take.  The SurDoc company understands that and has an offer to help you keep not only your digital photos safe, but word documents, spreadsheets, scanned items, pdf’s, videos, presentations and much more that you might have saved in your computer.

To introduce you to their services, they are offering readers a  free 30 GB account. Just go to their website and plug in the promo code CATPHOTOS to get started. All the technical details that are way over my head will be there and you can learn all about clouds, automatic file storage, and fun stuff like that. 

One last bonus – those of you that are familiar with my blog know that my fiancé Dan is quite talented when it comes to the photos you see of my feline family. He provides me with an endless source of perfectly framed, stunning images of my cats for me to destroy by Photoshopping  silly hats and whatnot on them!! Sorry Dan… Anyhow, for those of you that wish you could take such great pictures too, Dan has graciously put together a list of his best tips for TAKING PURR-FECT CAT PHOTOS that was turned into a real cool infographic for your reference!  Hmm…. Maybe I should read that and try to learn a thing or two! Nah, I’d rather just have Dan take the photos, I’ll stick to the writing and Photoshopping!!