A Design For Life: Stories From Behind The Lens

2019 Chronicles Part 8: Crash Into Me

"The Hard Drive: The part of the computer that stops working when you spill beer on it."

Dave Barry

If there's one thing photographers don't do, it's never to underestimate the unexpected.

While I'm pretty sure that besides having your gear break down on you is every photographer's ultimate nightmare, the second worst nightmare is when his or her hard drive containing his/her work suddenly crashes, and all the work that the photographer has painstakingly compiled over the years gets deleted in a heartbeat.

It's like waking up in the morning to find that the life you lived up to that point was a lie and that you never existed. It's painful.

On my second last day in London in 2015, that fear became a reality when for some unknown reason, the portable hard drive that I had been carrying with me the last 2 years suddenly JUST. WOULDN'T. WORK.

Believe me, I tried every imaginable way to retrieve the photos that I had in there, but alas it was futile. The shots that I had from the time I started in 2013 right up to that point had vanished.

Gone in an instant.

The only shots I had left were the unedited shots from my time in the UK that was still in the SD card in my camera. If that had been in my hard drive, I would have probably gone into a nervous breakdown.

I looked up at the cold London sky, howled at the gods and bemoaned my bad luck (that didn't really happen. I just kept quiet and silently cursed my luck).

But the pain was real, and nothing I did could bring back the photos I had lost.

After 6 years in this business, if there's one thing I learned, it's that photographers are very particular about their stuff, ESPECIALLY when it comes to storage.

We are obsessed with it, and let me tell you why.

I once met a seasoned photographer who showed me his collection of 6 huge hard drives (yes, hard drives) and listened as he explained to me why he needed to store his work in all 6 of those things. He too had been in the same situation as I was, and from then on made it a point to save his work in as many storage places as he could so that should one hard drive fail him one day, he would have 5 others as back-up.

Now I'm not encouraging you to go out immediately and buy all the hard drives you lay your eyes on. Those things are not cheap, and while the portable ones provide you the ability to be mobile and carry it everywhere you go, it's the big non-portable ones that last longer.

I thought what happened to me in London was an isolated case, until my wife experienced a similar situation a couple of years later. She lost some really precious photos and was never able to retrieve them from the hard drive that she dropped. So the moral of the story is, DON'T buy portable hard drives!

Unlike my friend, I'm not that obsessed with having too many storage units for my work, although these days the emergence of online storage services like Dropbox and Google Photos have been life-savers. I do have a couple of big hard drives that I use to store my work, and I make sure to do regular checks on them just to be sure that they are in good working condition. You never know when these things might break down one day, and when they do, you need to be prepared.

So do yourself a favour, and start saving your work in as many storage services as you can. It may cost some money, but you will not regret it in the long run!