** Details have been changed in order to protect friends and customers! **
A few evenings back, I was twiddling away in my home office when the phone rang. It was an old friend; hadn't heard anything from him in awhile. He had a friend who was a professional photographer.
It turns out the friend of a friend had recently completed some customer sessions (with obviously irreplaceable photos) and was editing them on an external enclosure. When he turned to take his laptop computer to another room, he forgot it was attached to the enclosure. The enclosure slid across the table, and quicker than you can say "uncontained disaster", the hard drive hit the floor.
Thereafter, it made funny clicking sounds. If it was a living creature, you could almost imagine blood flowing out of it as it made moans of death!
A couple of days later, we sent the damaged drive to Drivesavers. They have a thriving little business (actually, it's not so little) helping folks recover from these disasters.
Now the bad news: they had no good news, and there is no happy ending to this story. They pulled it apart and discovered that the drive was irreparably damaged, and the irreplaceable photos were gone forever.
The moral of the story: ALWAYS make a backup of your data.
"The Standard Pilot Blog"TM The Chipper and Radiant Blog for Experimental and Ultralight (Part 103) Aircraft (c) 2010 thru (c) 2020 by James Wiebe.
3 comments:
i just read your blog about going to idaho. i just want you to know that if you are ever in a generous and spoiling mood, and need a young male compadre to join you on such trips. please, o please, pick me. i wouldn't know what i was doing in the slightest but i can promise that you wouldn't hear a peep out of me as far as complaints. -khub
There is no such thing as a backup. There are only redundant points of failure.
In this case, the copy of the data on the hard drive should have BEEN the backup.
Since memory cards nowadays cost close to nothing, pro photographers have no excuse for erasing the cards for a given project before that project is complete (and, itself, backed up to DVD-R or whatever).
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