What would you do if your photo library disappeared overnight? That’s exactly what happened to a number of Adobe Lightroom users recently, after a software update wiped out their photos and editing settings. Any images that hadn’t yet been synced to Adobe’s Creative Cloud are now unrecoverable. Now’s a good time to think about how you can prevent this kind of data loss in the future.

Adobe promptly fixed its photo editing and storage app, but the lost images remain missing unless individual users had their own personal backup. Your photos contain the memories and history of your family, friends, and your entire life. Losing them is one of the biggest data loss nightmares for most people.

“After the automatic update to Lightroom mobile 5.4 on my iPad Pro (active subscription) my entire library was lost,” wrote Lightroom user Christoph Willerscheidt in the Photoshop Forum.

This incident shows the vulnerability of our data. In this case, it was the photos that were not uploaded to the cloud that were lost, but we usually only trust our photos, videos and documents to the cloud. That could be a mistake.