Rick’s Rants and Raves

Update: I found the answer.

When people ask me what I do for a living, the short answer is “I fix computers.” Now, I know today that is no longer the novelty is used to be, so I typically go on to explain that I support call routing software, like you hear at banks or the cable company, or whatever your favorite-toll-free-number-to-hate is. My company has roughly 1000 agents in four locations taking 35,000 calls per day. The software I support has to react perfectly to every one of those calls. Since these are customer calls, our goal is to never lose a single call. As such, every application has a backup installed on a different server, in a different location. Every server is chock-full of duplicated hardware–redundant network cables to connect to the rest of the organization, redundant hard drives, fault-tolerant memory and CPUs, etc. So I tend to spend my days thinking about redundancy, how to implement it, and researching why we’ve exposed a stupid little scenario in which the arcane cascade of 7 improbable events led to a 2 minute outage, impacting 250 customer calls.

I was in just such a frame of mind when I was downloading pictures from my camera the other day. I struggled for about ten minutes to get my computer to recognize the SD card that had been in my camera.  Eventually I got all but one of the pictures, and I learned that one of the family portraits I had taken was corrupted. Given the work I’d put into that day, I was pleased there wasn’t more damage. I immediately bought a new card, and threw the old one in the trash.

So this got me to wondering: How do professional photographers protect against digital media loss? On a professional shoot, I’ve seen extra cameras, and flashes, and batteries. And I’m sure there are extra tripods, and remotes, and probably some duct tape thrown in for good measure. But how do you know that your digital media card hasn’t failed during (or shortly after) a shoot?

As I was musing on this a couple of days ago, I told my wife that the obvious solution that the whole camera industry was missing was dual card slots. If the camera would just write to two cards simultanesously, then the whole problem was solved. If only someone as bright as me had such great ideas at Nikon or Canon, this problem would be a thing of the past.

Alas, the $8000 Nikon D3x has dual Compact Flash card slots: “with overflow, backup, and copy options.” With the backup and copy option, the only excuse you have for losing a picture is yourself. Other cameras may have it, but that appears to be the only one Nikon carries. Now, my hobby doesn’t justify an $8000 camera, but I do hope that some day that feature will trickle down to the consumer grade DSLR cameras, in much the same way that redundant computer hardware has reached high-end consumer PCs.

However, I’m still left with the question–how do professional photographers that don’t have a D3x protect against digital media loss? I’ll pose this question to a few semi-pro folks I know, and post to a few message boards, and see what kind of response I get. If you have thoughts, please feel free to leave them in the comments.