My latest review at Scrapbook Update turned out to be on a very timely topic- backups. For those who aren't aware, Scrapbook Update's hosting service experienced a catastrophic failure in the server that houses the site a little over a week ago, and almost all of Scrapbook Update's content for the year was lost. Full details are here, but in a nutshell the hosting service was supposed to be providing a backup service for the site and wasn't, and the staff has been scrambling to restore content from the partial backup pulled by owner and editor Nancy Nally a week before the crash (and also thanking Google for the large amount of caching that Google Reader does). Most of the images for the site's articles weren't present in that backup and we've all been raiding Flickr photo streams, hard drive directories, and Lightroom catalogs to try to get those restored.
In an ironic twist, one of the articles that was permanently lost with no hope of recovery (I couldn't even pull a draft out of my own web browser's cache) was the review of the Picture Keeper photo backup device that I'd written and submitted for review just days before the crash. Since the post was only a draft and had been written after the last backup, all my work was completely lost. Luckily I had saved the images to a directory on my own hard drive, but I still had to re-write the nearly 2,000 word review from scratch.
So, after all that work, how did the Picture Keeper stack up as a backup solution? You'll have to hop on over to Scrapbook Update to read my (ahem) honest and unbiased review to get the answer to that question. :)
And the moral of this entire tale? Back up, back up, back up!!!