HP and designer Vivienne Tam announced yesterday their collaboration on a special edition notebook intended to be the ultimate technology fashion statement. 

The digital clutch was unveiled at Tam’s show during New York’s Fashion Week, and features a pink and purple peony design on a red background on the exterior, and HP’s notebook technology on the inside.

The digital clutch notebook includes a matching embroidered sleeve, and is expected to be available in North America in early 2009.

If you’re an artist of any kind — musician, photographer, fine artist, crafter, embroiderer — you probably have countless files on your hard drive.  For some of you, those files may even be your livelihood.  And I’d be willing to bet that many of you rarely, if ever, back up your data.  Antivirus software may offer you some level of protection, but what happens if something slips through, or you experience an equipment malfunction? Hurricane Katrina taught me a valuable first-hand lesson, and you could just as easily experience a natural disaster.

You might think that data loss would be a minor inconvenience, but let’s think about this for a minute.  How many years have you been collecting those embroidery designs?  Some of your freebies may not even be available anymore. And what about those designs you digitized yourself? They represent many hours of effort on your part.

Consider the wedding photographer who doesn’t have a backup of the wedding photos he shot over the weekend.  He hasn’t completed his post-processing, so he hasn’t yet ordered prints.  Data loss in this case could be extremely costly, resulting in both a refund of his fee and a badly damaged reputation.

This isn’t a tech blog, so I won’t offer you information on how to do a file backup.  I don’t have any products to plug either.  I’m simply suggesting that, as an artist in the digital age, you arm yourself with some information and create a disaster recovery plan for yourself, so you can avoid some of the pain we’ve experienced in recent days.  Do a little internet research, or talk to a tech-savvy friend. Choose your backup media, whether a hard drive or dvd or other option.  Select a backup method.  Schedule your backups, and be diligent about completing them.  And by all means, protect yourself from viruses and other malicious attacks.

Dan was lucky this time.  All his photos are on his MacBook instead of his PC.  We’re still cleaning up the mess, but I doubt if I’ll ever again hear those words, “But I’ve never had a problem before!”