Litter Cyberspace With Backups & Copies!

I had an extended discussion today with someone about digital photographs, and I would like to pass on some advice about what came out of that discussion.

The person I was speaking to had a really nice DSLR, a Nikon with a big zoom lens. The discussion started because someone else needed a copy of one of the pictures on the camera. To me this was a trivial task — pop out the memory card, stick it into a card reader, copy the file, stick it on a memory stick or email it or put it on Dropbox or…

The camera owner didn’t want any doing this, preferring to keep all of his pictures “safe” on the memory card. He offered to take the camera to a drug store or other store where he could get a hard copy printed out, since he believe that to be “easier.”

The point here isn’t that this guy (or a hundred million other folks) get cameras and phones and computers and tablets and other tech devices that are far beyond what they need. It’s not that they’ll end up using only maybe 5% of the equipment’s capacity. And it’s not that these folks are ignorant or somehow “unworthy” of having equipment that they’re not using. I’m a long way from being an elitist, trust me.

The point is that in this case and many others like it, users of this technology and equipment don’t realize that it’s their data that’s important. More importantly, they don’t have some very fundamental concepts of what can be done to protect and manipulate that data.

If you know someone like this, here’s the number one thing to try to get across to them — it’s trivially easy to make copies of your data (pictures, video, music, notes, writing, whatever) and to make LOTS of copies and keep them in LOTS of separate places.

Too many people (of all ages, but weighted somewhat towards older folks) think of things in a physical sense. That is, you can’t copy a book because it would take forever to put each page on a photocopier to get another physical copy. You can’t copy every picture you have because it would cost a zillion dollars to print them all out and to print multiple copies and then it would take a huge storage space to hold them. They may very well know on an intellectual level that they’re dealing with electronic files instead of physical objects, but at a more basic, emotional, gut level, they’re tied to the 3-D real world.

So you take pictures and they’re stored on that card in the camera — but they don’t know how to get them off of that card, or if they do, they’re thinking in terms of making a copy onto another card. I’ve met people (couldn’t make this crap up!) who couldn’t use their cameras because the memory card was full, so they start going through all of the precious memories and pictures and video on the cards to see what they can erase and sacrifice to take more pictures.

Why don’t they copy the pictures off onto a computer and then delete all of them so they have the full capacity of the card available? They didn’t know you could do that, or they think it’s really hard. (You can, it’s not.) If they don’t have access to a computer right now, why don’t they just put in a new, spare card? They didn’t know that was a possibility, and cards must be really expensive. (It is, they’re not.)

Then, once you have your pictures/video/data off onto your computer, MAKE COPIES! Perform backups! Put copies on DropBox! Burn a copy to DVD and put the DVD(s) in a safe deposit box! Transfer a copy to multiple memory sticks! Take one memory stick (they’re cheap!) fill it up, mail it to someone in another state so that even if your whole house is burglarized or burns to the ground or is destroyed by a giant earthquake or tornado or flood or Godzilla attack, you still have a copy out there from which to recover your data.

There are two types of people. Those who have lost massive amounts of irreplaceable data in a computer crash, hardware failure, fire, natural disaster, power surge, cosmic ray hit, dropping it into the toilet, or just plain old fashioned Murphy’s Law — and those who will.

To my surprise, when I started to use that old chestnut of computer wisdom in my discussion this afternoon, our photographer knew the punch line. But it had never happened to him, and he was confident that it wouldn’t.

Ummm… Okay, just gonna let that one stand on its own.

I’ve lost days of irreplaceable vacation photographs when my full memory cards (and the briefcase holding them) were stolen. Now I’m a bit fanatical about copying memory cards off to a laptop EVERY DAY on a vacation or other big event (airshow, family event, school reunion, wedding, etc).

I’ve lost weeks of irreplaceable video when the memory cards that were playing back video just fine on the trip all of a sudden gave, “Format error – can not read card” messages at home. Hey, that’s just data, just like the photos in the previous paragraph! How about we copy it all onto a laptop every day as well?

I’ve had laptops fried while in transit (I suspect the TSA turned it on to make sure it was “real”, left it on when they stuck it back in the bag, and let it fry with no airflow) and all of the data transferred off to them be gone — which is why I make copies of the memory cards onto the computer, I don’t transfer the files off of the memory card while on the road.

NEVER leave yourself a single point of failure where your data can be lost! Murphy and his gremlin minions love it when you do. Always have your camera’s memory card, and copies on your laptop, and copies on a memory stick. When you get home, and you’ve made copies on your home computer as well, and on an external backup drive, and on a cloud-based service such as DropBox, and maybe on a DVD — and when you’ve verified that you copied everything correctly — THEN you can erase those memory cards to re-use them.

You’ve heard me say over and over and over that digital photographs are cheap, cheap, cheap — take lots of pictures!

The corollary to that is to make lots and lots of copies and backup copies and backup copies of the backup copies. Digital storage in multiple locations and multiple formats is also cheap, cheap, cheap.

Murphy and his evil gremlin minions hate it when you do that. And I hate Murphy and his evil gremlin minions.

And when you ignore me and wind up losing your pictures and video and data, remember that there are some very good data recovery tools for a reasonable price. They won’t help you get back your Montreal pictures that are on the stolen memory cards, but they’ll do wonders on rebuilding the lost Mexico cruise videos from that corrupted memory card.

Murphy really, really hates that.