Today is a day I'm extremely grateful for Time Machine, software built-in to my Mac that backs up all of my precious data. I had a Maxtor external HD which contained my library containing all of my photos. Today, this hard drive was coming up as corrupted, and not usable by my system. I would have begun panicking, but instead I just jumped into my backup and retrieved my backup copy which is currently transferring to another hard drive I found. It may take a long time to move over, but it's well worth it knowing I haven't lost anything.

If you haven't already, by all means do yourself a huge favor and invest in an external hard drive. It will be the best money spent, and you'll thank me if you ever encounter something like this. I normally am not emotionally attached to my data; I know technology can be imperfect, and can fail at any time. But, knowing that I have a safety copy of something like my photos, which are very near and dear to me, makes me sleep just a little better at night.

My thanks to Apple for building this amazingly useful feature into the system!!!