I want to tell you about four minutes this week where I was fairly sure a chunk of the project had just evaporated.
Here's what happened, stripped of specifics: a drive did the thing drives do when they've decided your day is going too well. It made a noise. The folder I needed wasn't where I left it. And for four minutes — I counted them later, they were long — I sat there running the arithmetic of exactly how much work I might have just lost and how far back the last safe copy was.
The answer, in those four minutes, felt like: too much, and too far. My stomach did something I don't have a polite word for.
It turned out fine. The files were there, the drive was just being dramatic, and a copy existed anyway in a place I'd half-forgotten setting up months ago. Past-me, it turns out, had quietly saved present-me's entire afternoon and probably my week. I'd like to thank him but he's not answering.
But the four minutes did their job, which was to scare me honest. Because the uncomfortable truth is our backup situation was held together mostly by luck and good intentions. We
meant to have a proper system. We'd talked about it. Talking about backups is, it turns out, not the same as having them — a lesson the universe seems very keen for every small studio to learn the hard way, ideally at least once.
The thing about being tiny is there's no IT person, no server humming in a cupboard somewhere doing this for you automatically. If a drive dies here, there's no invisible safety net. There's just whatever we personally remembered to set up between the actual work. And "the actual work" always feels more urgent than protecting the actual work, right up until the exact moment it very much doesn't.
So we spent yesterday doing the boring, unglamorous thing: real backups, in more than one place, running on their own without anyone having to remember. It produced nothing you could look at. It was the least fun day we've had in a while. It's also, possibly, the most important, in the way insurance is boring until it's the only thing that matters.
Three copies now. Different places. I checked twice.
The drive, by the way, is in the bin. It knows what it did.
— Thiago & the Pixel Sprout team
Posted by Thiago Moreira · July 30, 2026
← All news
