For the last two months, I had been driving around the country snapping pictures of localities to be published in local calendars. Had done quite a bit, and was rather pleased because I had even managed to capture some shots of very particular events in each location that only happen there once a year.
Unfortunately, I was moving house at the same time. And I do have to admit here, that I had been procrastinating a bit on the packing. (Wait for it, there is a link here... do you see it coming?)
I have two portable external USB hard drives. Generally, after a photo shoot, I'll transfer all my images from the memory cards to one of the hard disk and during the evening take a backup to the other one. About once every two months I will also copy to CDs.
In any case I moved house... things were going fairly smoothly, unpacked most of the stuff... and then set up my desktop computer. Couldn't get the wireless internet connection working. Very frustrating, especially since the laptop didn't seem to have any problems. After spending a couple of days on that, I decided to take a break from that particular issue and work on the photos instead. Turn on the hard drive... whirrrrrrrrrr.... beeeeeeep.... beeepity beeep. And I'm thinking to myself "You are a hard drive, not a b*** modem. Stop making that noise". After about 30 minutes of this I suddenly realised, the hard drive is knackered. Obviously, during the move it must have got dropped or something and the head has crashed, (that was the link in case you missed it).
I'm not going to get anything off it.
No problem, I turn on the backup drive. Oh crap, during this hectic period I had been extremely lazy and not done any backups at all. So two months of work down the drain. And my deadline was only a week away.
So I just spent the entire last weekend driving around the region taking shots again and getting royally p*** off because of course all the special events are no longer there.
Moral of the story, never move house... OK... the simpler one is to always take backups immediately. But with the technological advances (concerns about backward compatibility) and sometimes the fragile nature of the media (how easy is it to scratch CDs and DVDs), what is the best way to do this. Would love to hear from everyone as to how they handle this and what their routine is.
In any case, I think I've learnt my lesson. Of hell, I think I forgot to take a copy of last nights transfers!
