If you've scanned the headlines lately or simply live downwind of the central portion of the 31st state, you're aware that far too much of California has been ablaze in the last month. It happens that I live darned close to a couple of these hot-spots and, having packed the car twice now with the idea of fleeing with family and felines when the reverse 911 call comes in, it's natural that my attention has been increasingly devoted to emergency preparedness--and that includes the protection and salvation of my data.

When Fire 1 ignited about a month ago, my office was a mess. I had files scattered across seven separate hard drives and three different computers. Had I been in a position where I had to leave Right Now, every bit of data I owned would have been lost. Fortunately I had time so I chose the brute-force technique--I threw all the computers in the car along with a duffel-bag full of hard drives. You can imagine the "You say you do this kind of thing for a living?" look I got from my wife who, wisely, had her most important data backed up onto a single drive that she'd stuffed into her purse.

Last weekend's Fire 2--closer than the first--saw little improvement on my part. Although I'd procured a new 750GB drive to feed Time Machine--and thus had a readily grabbable backup of my current work files, email, contacts, and calendars--the files I really wanted remained parsed out among a host of internal and external hard drives. And by "really wanted" I don't mean MacUserHelp Folder columns from 1997, a Breen's Bungalow video from 2000, or even the iTunes-procured copy of Noel Harrison's Life is a Dream.

What I do mean is my photos and home movies.

I can replace music. I can let go of a couple of decades worth of work. I can buy another computer. But I can't replace the images of a child's first years or a parent's last. And to risk losing those images to a natural disaster--even one as natural and predictable as a hard drive crash--because I'm disorganized is just stupid.

So in the "fool me once/fool me twice" vein, I'm changing my ways, in these ways:

Gathered memories I have multiple iPhoto Library archives scattered about. I've now copied those archives to a single hard drive. Similarly I've copied my Aperture libraries to that same drive. In addition, I've used Leopard's Smart Folder feature to seek out all Camera Raw images and copied those to that same drive. Yes, I have duplicate files. At some point I may sort through the images and remove the duplicates. For now, I'm happy to know that I have all my images within easy reach.

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