Last year I was here. It was January, and before the expedition ship upped anchor and sailed away from Argentina, I was literally standing at the end of the world here in the beautiful 'Fin del Mundo' - Tierra del Fuego National Park. No still, dappled and shimmering pond such as where I walked in my last post. The huge and heaving Southern Ocean awaited beyond the shore and the Beagle Channel, ready to transport us to places seen by few. It was so peaceful here and on the lands visited beyond South America - The Falkland Islands, South Georgia Island, and eventually Antarctica. Time stood still and I felt at peace away from the normal world.
Week before last, this January, I experienced another 'end of the world' moment, but it wasn't peaceful. My entire iPhoto library on this MacBook was accidentally deleted. Fortunately I had backed up all travel pictures through last October (not including the trip to Central Europe though, darn it!), but not a lot of other pics which I'm going to miss. Yes, they're gone forever as after a week with a very nice certified Apple techie, the news yesterday was "sorry Mary, they are unrecoverable". Collecting my Mac - and having the tech guy set me up with a portable backup system to ensure this doesn't occur again - was not unpleasant as everyone at the business was so accommodating. In case you ever need recovery assistance with an Apple computer - and I hope you don't - know that they do not offer that service at the Genius Bar, you either have to buy a program and try to do it yourself, or take it to a certified technician as I opted to do.
It's NOT quite the end of the world though. Fortunately lots of the lost photos have been posted on my blog, and thankfully many are in the PicMonkey file where I edited such pics - these I can always find again. This was a learning curve, and made me realize one can never be too careful when it comes to saving precious photos if you are a digital photographer who stores them on your computer........and erases your camera cards as I do when traveling and taking literally thousands of photos!
So I'm back in the saddle so to speak - using my MacBook and planning to be more diligent in 'housekeeping' here. Technology is complicated, my generation often finds it hard to master, it moves much too fast and our older brains can't keep up, well OURS here in a certain cottage can't, how about you?
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Dear Mary, Have you checked Picassa. You have a picture file there because you are a Blogger. Have you checked into Carbonite for your future photo storage?
ReplyDeleteYes Gina, pics used on the blog are there in Picasa but none of the other pics which were not added to the blog! I think I'm set up now with the Seagate Backup Plus which can be used with all our Macs. Also, when I travel I will plan to always have several extra camera cards and KEEP them after uploading to the computer - not clean them to reuse - worth the extra dollars!
DeleteThanks for the comment dear - Mary
How disappointing. A lesson for us all here. I'm not a fan of storing things in the "cloud" but it would be a way to ensure photos are not lost, especially when I do a backup infrequently.
ReplyDeleteBeautiful Tierra del fuego - we'd love to visit Chile one day. I've talked about your Antarctic cruise to my husband a lot, and last week we met someone whose son is a naturalist on an Antarctic cruise. I didn't get his name (last name may be Ashurst), but his father had stunning photos in his office which I recognized from yours.
When I first started taking alot of digital photos, I took a class. The teacher said to store photos in three places.
ReplyDeleteI feel guilty because I don't. Like you I do erase the memory card once I load them on the computer. Last year
I lost some photos on my old laptop that died. Now I pay $5 a month for backup service, but I still feel like I need
that third place with an external drive. I need to get one soon.
Blogging many pictures, I am so glad you have done that, so some pictures were saved. Oh so sad for you though,
at the pictures you lost. The two shared here are thought were definitely postcard worthy, each so beautiful!
Yes, I do like your idea for keeping the cards when traveling. Good idea!
xoxo m
Oh Mary, I grieve over lost photos .. silly me. But they can be especially important to some people, for keeping memories alive.
ReplyDeleteI am so sorry .. Now I save them in all sorts of ways .. my husband used to tease me about seeing me as a very old lady, surrounded by photos that all sort of look alike and there I am trying to remember where this was taken and when lol ... I am not known for being very organized, no matter how hard I try :)
Thank you for your comment, yes, Argentina is having a hard time but I would go there in a minute if I could. besitos, C
The photos of the end of the world are beautiful. The loss is terrible. Years ago I had a hard drive crash and lost not only pictures but all my music.
ReplyDeleteI now have a Terra bite external back up and a subscription to Mozy. The reason for two? I had another hard drive crash and recovering the pictures from Mozy was brutal. It took days. But they were there. Now have have a hard drive mirror if this puppy dies.
I am betting that not too long from now we will have access to a user friendly cloud.
I have a huge external drive that I back up photos to - and it lives in the safe deposit box at the bank. You might be warned - Picasa does NOT store photos - they told me so in no uncertain terms - you have files there as long as the photos are still on your computer - but if the photos are deleted from your computer you can't find them on Picasa any more. The file of blog photos on Picasa is temporary and if your blog photos no longer exist on the computer - poof - they are gone from picasa. I've heard many tales of woe because people thought that if they could see their photos on Picasa that it was a back up system, sadly it isn't. And that is where new technology gets us sometimes - hard to understand some of it and we end up with mistakes.
ReplyDeleteI have my recent photos backed up on thumb drives that are at least 32G - I can access them from my computer and from the drives themselves - all are backed up every three months on the external - and of course they are on my computer. They say three times is safe. There is a new external drive out that is 3x5" and less than an inch thick and hold 2 Terabytes - now isn't that just the dandiest thing? I think I'll get me one - my current external is about 6x9x3 - a real clunker compared to the new tiny one - and only holds half as much - though I've not nearly filled it - yet.
Hi Mary, yes, I can understand how that could be disappointing and frustrating, but you are so right, it's not the end of the world. In fact, I've got digital photos in so many places. Some I can retrieve, some I can't. In the end, does it really matter, not really. I actually like the old way of taking photos on film and then having them developed. With digital, it is way too easy to take way too many pictures. I have a hard time organizing them all. A few weeks ago, I my laptop wouldn't recognize my iPhone or my Canon. I spent hours and hours and hours -- 2 days of my time, trying to figure it out. Finally, I figured it out -- I reset my computer to an earlier date and the settings at that time were reinstalled. Thank goodness! Hubby's answer is always "buy a new one" but this laptop isn't even a year old yet. I'm glad you were able to get most of your problem sorted out. Your photos are always so gorgeous! Best wishes, Tammy
ReplyDeleteMary, it's a hard lesson learned. I've been using an external hard drive every week to save my data (all photos). I'm a memory card deleter. I don't like a full card or even 100 photos on it. I also have 'some' photos on CD's but I'm not sure how safe they are into the future. I guess nothing is safe from theft or fire or water damage. A fire/smoke proof steel box maybe ?? lol My pics are stored in Picasa too. I like your idea of using more than one memory card when traveling. Especially on a major trip like you have taken. You could have one of each city, country, etc. Good post, Mary! Have a cozy evening.
ReplyDeleteI delete my memory card, too. I back up all photos on an Exterior Hard Drive, but those fail, too. I've heard good things about "the cloud" but I am not sure what that means. Sigh. There's so much to learn and technology is moving so fast.
ReplyDeleteJust a thought for you. I haven't had time to read thru all the comments so someone may have already mentioned this.
ReplyDeleteBecause, I travel a lot and my blog is the easiest way for my kids to keep up with our whereabouts, I make it into a book every yr and make copies for each of them. The blog is also a diary of our lives so it's a nice keepsake for all of us. AND its a way to have a hard copy of important pics that I put there. I just ordered my book this morning of my blog from jan 13-dec 13 and it took about 10 min to download and order. Of course, that's not your whole collection of pics that we keep on computers, but I back up every 3 months to 2 external hard drives. Just another way, publishing, to protect your images.
My heart breaks for you. As a fellow photographer, I know how it hurts to lose photos. I am a bit of a fanatic about storage. I use the Time Machine function to back up on a 2 TB drive. Then I have 2 more drives to hold photos not on my computer. Each is a duplicate of the other. I have dozens of digital cards, and don't format them until I know I have 2 copies of everything. And even then, it can be 6 months or so before I do that. I use multiple cards of each trip, usually changing them out every day or two. And I keep track of them better than my wallet! I have handy little card wallets, one for each camera, and cards formatted and dedicated to my different cameras. And I still haven't decided on a cloud storage service, but hope to get that done after I finish up with income tax chores. Whew! There's a lot to it!
ReplyDeleteI for got to mention that my other 2drives are 4TB each. They should last me a while!
ReplyDeleteDear Mary - I know how disappointed I would be to loose all of my pictures from iPhotos so I do empathise with you.
ReplyDeleteWhen we bought our Mac my son insisted that I have a hard drive attached to the computer, which I think means that everything is safe on a disc inside it - anyway I notice that it automatically backs up everything I do everyday. I hope that means I am OK.
I have two memory cards which hold about 600 photos which seems to be enough on my trips. I also carry an extra battery so that when one is recharging I have another to use.
PS I have noticed that some people have mentioned their hard drive crashing - oh dear! isn't the techi world complicated.
Anyway my hard drive went wrong and was replaced by the shop under guarantee but all the stuff was still on the computer and my son helped me to transfer it to the new replacement hard drive.
Take care Mary and good luck.
Maybe not the end of the world in reality but I bet it felt like it? What a shame to have lost so many wonderful photographic memories, Mary, so glad that all was not lost.
ReplyDeleteI store my pix on my laptop then erase them from the memory card, every few months the SP comes onto my machine remotely and copies them to his PC which he backs up to the external hard drive., having an in-house techie is a godsend!