This week’s blog post is going to look a little different.

Earlier this week, my cat stepped on my keyboard and somehow managed to delete my entire cemetery photography folder. Years of cemetery photos, research, blog drafts, and organizing work disappeared in an instant. Needless to say, it has been a stressful few days.

Thankfully, I do have a backup from early 2025, so not everything is gone. I’ve also been working through recovery software trying to salvage as much as possible from my hard drive. So far, I think I’ve managed to recover most of it, but there are still around 800 files missing, and I’m not yet sure exactly what was lost.

Right now, my main focus is rebuilding and reorganizing everything. Once I finish recovering what I can, I’ll need to merge those files with my backup and basically piece my archive back together folder by folder. It’s going to take some time.

Unfortunately, that also means the post I had planned for this week is going to be delayed while I sort everything out.

This has been a painful reminder about the importance of backups. I had actually planned to buy a new terabyte drive earlier this year and start doing more regular backups, but I kept putting it off.

I definitely regret that decision now.

Once everything is stabilized again, I’ll be setting up a much cleaner backup system and doing monthly backups moving forward.

I’m not going to pretend this week has been easy. I’ve lost sleep over it, and seeing years of work suddenly disappear was honestly heartbreaking. But I’m trying to stay hopeful. I think most of the archive can be recovered, even if rebuilding everything will take a while.

So if things seem a little quieter here over the next little bit, that’s why. And if there’s one thing I can pass along from this experience: back up your files.

Seriously. Don’t wait until something goes wrong.

Thanks for sticking with me while I get things back in order.