We all know that backing up your hard drives are the right thing to do. Even if they are just archived files of things you have on air already...

I just had my studio broken into. They came in through the garage door in the back. Took a ton of high end lighting and cameras from my friend's video and photography company... they got to my portion of the offices with little time left as they tried to lift the computers, but it appears they only moved them out and started to unhook them before leaving the scene.

What they did take was my Presonus Mixer, a couple of mics and 6TBs of hard drive archives. My life's work. Some of it backed up, some of it not. This includes my design ideas and concepts for my previous jobs at Clear Channel Radio and Cumulus Broadcasting, 4 years worth of archives of the several podcasts I have put together and more. A chilling reminder that hard drive failure isn't the only issue... more importantly here are the tips I have for you from this incident.

1. Inventory Every Piece of Equipment.
I did not have everything inventoried. I could tell you that I had a MyBook 2TB harddrive and I had another 3TB hard drive... unfortunately, I don't have the serial numbers for those drives... I can't even remember what brand one of them were. I am looking online to see if I can figure it out.

There are several things I can't even think of that I didn't use on a regular basis that may or may not be gone....

2. Backup Hard Drives AND (the other important thing) Keep one off site.
I didn't have it all backed up, but the stuff I did, was on a different hard drive at the same location... so it is gone now.

3. Under NO circumstances should you EVER not have insurance on your equipment. Given the holidays were approaching I made the inexcusable decision to drop coverage and pick it up in February to get through these tight times. Guess how much money I saved.... due to this issue it is definitely negative thousands... So don't do it ever. If you are making this a business... make sure you go out and get insurance now. End of story.

So now I am left trying to figure out exactly what is missing, how to replace it and keep moving on. Thankfully I have enough backup equipment that I use for an on location podcast that I can continue on, but it sucks that I am missing several files from my lifes work.