Industry corruption
I often hear about people losing their holiday snaps due to not backing up their data – and I always insist on sneering haughtily at their naivety and amateur ways. It’s usually due to the loss of a phone, or when they wipe a memory card clean, or something equally as pathetic. It will never happen to me – never.
Until now that is.
One of the few pictures of our holiday – taken on a very reliable iPhone 6 – at Blackpool Pleasure Beach
I recently took the kids on a five day holiday to Lancashire. My wife was unavoidably held back due to a work emergency, so we decided that it was best if I make my way there with them. It was a four day “glamping” experience, followed by a day in Blackpool, before returning home. The campsite was frankly fabulous, with big static tents containing wood-burning stoves, full beds, cooking utensils, coolbox, running water, toilets, and paraffin lamps for evening light. There was an on-site honesty shop, pizza oven, huge play barn for the kids, and all sorts of animals to pet on the farm. We were on our own for the first 3 days, then my missus managed to get the train down so that we could finish our vacation as a family. It was a lovely, relaxing holiday for us, and the nippers enjoyed making friends.
Taking family photos is always a big part of my holiday – it’s what I do. Capturing some of the moments for future memories is important to me. I packed simply – my Fuji X-E2 mirrorless, with the kit lens and a wide 10-24mm. I shot loads of stuff – including videos of the kids giving messages to their absent mum. When she arrived, we had group shots and everything. I had five spare batteries, and four high capacity SD cards- two Sandisk 16gb Extreme Pro’s, one 16gb Lexar Pro, and an 8gb Lexar. Never having had a problem with any of them, I stuck one of the Sandisks in, and formatted it ready for action. All went swimmingly until we headed to Blackpool, and spent a day at the Pleasure beach. It rained pretty much constantly, and heavily from the second we got there until getting back to our hotel. As we left the pleasure beach, the battery indicator started flashing red, so I opened the compartment to change the battery. At that point I noticed that the SD card had popped out, so I pushed it back in and swapped batteries. The back of the screen suddenly read “card not initialised”. Uh-oh. I changed SD cards, and kept on shooting.
We got home the following day, and I plugged the card into the SD reader on my iMac. Unmountable. Nothing I did would allow the computer to recognise it. I’ve got Sandisk Rescue Pro software, but it didn’t help in any way. My holiday pictures were lost.
Googling the issue threw up a load of identical instances of this happening with Sandisk cards. They’re pretty sensitive things, and if the card is ejected during a read/write, it often becomes so corrupted that it’s unusable afterwards. Looked like this was the case. I could either resign myself to ditching the visual memories of our vacation, or biting the bullet and contacting the pro’s. I got in touch with Rapid Data recovery in that there London, and was pleasantly surprised to be contacted on a Sunday afternoon to be told that it wasn’t a major issue, and could be sorted at relatively little cost. I packed the card off with instructions to retrieve 183 raw image files totalling about 6gb.
Today I received the call advising of the diagnostic report – the monolith chip within the SD card was damaged, and would require 6 hours of manual work plus data retrieval time to even give a chance (without any guarantee of success) of getting anything back. Cost of said procedure – £588 including vat. A non-starter. Lost my holiday pictures.
I had a solution – an easy solution! I simply booked the same holiday again – in the October school holidays at a cost of £349. There’s always a workaround. In the meantime, I’m going to begin using much smaller SD cards, and I may get one of those readers that can plug into an iPad, for backing up on the go.
I read that nowadays, amateur picture-takers are going to be the first generation since our great-grandparents to probably not have any photos of themselves growing up – because the images are exclusively taken digitally, and stored on devices that last a few years. Will you have your sparkly iPhone 6 in 2050? Think you’ll be able to hand down your Facebook shots to your kids?Think again. Backup, and print what you’ve got. Wish I had.
