Do you remember that family trip to Hawaii? What about that 18th birthday? I bet you have a great handful of small memories from those occasions. Maybe not the 18th birthday, but either way the human memory can only remember so many experiences.
How do we remember these things? How do we relive them? How do you prove to your buddies that you in fact did do x number of shots on your coming of age party?
Photographs.
I know I am not the only person who has a deep appreciation for photography. For me, having a career where I record other people’s experiences is pretty neat, but the perks of the trade is that I get to record my own experiences too.
I have a vast collection of images, everything from the first time I touched a race car, to our prime minister’s election speech a couple years ago. Pictures speak 1,000 words.
I have been taking photos since 2006 professionally. I did reasonably well in photojournalism school, but completely overlooked one of the most important lessons my instructor, Frank Shufletoski, taught. Back up your data.
Two weeks ago, on a deadline day for the Rocky View Weekly, I found myself with a very slow computer. The computer is a few years old, and has been used trackside at racetracks, and has even fallen out a window at a friend’s home in Toronto. I am used to the computer being a little slow. But that day was different.
After a couple restarts, I got a blank white screen. Not good. I paid a visit to the Apple genius bar, only to find out that my hard drive was failing, and to use the computer, I would have to pull it out and put a new one in. Even worse. Luckily with hard drives, you can put them into an enclosure and still attempt to access the data on it.
I purchased a new hard drive, and an enclosure for the old one. I had one of my tech savvy friends give me a hand in doing the change. Once the old hard drive was in the enclosure, I plugged it into another computer and to my surprise, the drive showed up, and all my data was accessible.
Because of the incredible time constraints with a newspaper needing to be sent to press, I didn’t bother moving the data to a good drive. Instead I pulled just a couple images needed for that edition off of the drive, hoping that I could move all the 13,000 images on the drive over another day. Wrong move.
When I finally had my machine back up and running, and was ready to move everything over, the drive had completely failed. I could not access a thing. The out-of-camera files from about May of 2012 until this month were on the drive.
That is two personal vacations, five international motor racing events, family photos, and weeks and weeks of Airdrie City View and Rocky View Weekly photos.
In addition, there are folders for each year of my professional career, which contains every edited image I had done in that time on the drive.
I was devastated. I completely realized that this was 100 per cent my own fault. In PJ school, countless times, they drive the fact that you should have backups of everything, and backups of your backups. I thought I was invincible. I have plenty of archives at home, but nothing that is organized or that I could quickly access. Two weeks later, I have all my data back. It cost me just short of $600 to recover a 320 gigabyte hard drive. The process yielded 99 per cent recovery, and I only lost a handful of photos in the process. But, it’s the extra costs that made it a tough pill to swallow.
Hard drive and RAM for my computer ran me just short of $200. I have invested that amount again in smaller drives for backups, and with hours spent organizing and managing the data, I proudly say that I have a single backup of everything I have done in my career and then some.
My message to everyone out there is to invest a little bit of time and money now, to save yourself a lot in the future. Computer crashes, much like a car crash, cost a lot of money. We all have those family photos we cherish, let’s do our best to guarantee we have them forever!
