A good reason why you should back up your travel photos
It’s 12.21am, I’ve got a job to go for tomorrow but I’m staring in front of the computer, wondering to myself what are sectors and clusters and praying hard that not too many of them have been damaged.
Yes, my 1 TB hard disk has crashed. (I have no back up for this as I thought my 6-year-old laptop had a higher tendency to crash, as compared to my 1-year-old hard disk). And as Murphy’s Law dictates, the most important folder which contains my travel photos of 4 years has been affected, and it’s taking forever to get those back. (Those files in my hard disk that I plan on deleting are still miraculously present and accessible.)
The current success rate is about 80%. I feel like one of those Mediacorp heroines in Channel 8 (A popular Mandarin Channel in Singapore) dramas, trying to wake up their loved ones from a coma and revive their memory. My heart cheers joyfully when the computer restores these photos at lightening speed, but heaves a sign when it meets an error. The worst part of it all is that it takes forever for the computer to restore a corrupted file. And even after it does that, the photo cannot be viewed. Therefore I have taken to manually restoring folders such that it is possible to skip restoring the corrupted files.
I mean, the good thing for me is that I think it’s a logical problem. eg. The hard disk has forgotten where the files and information are, so it’s a matter of trying to locate about 50,000 files which are lying everywhere. Approximately 20% will not be able to be revived again.
Honestly speaking, I would not have viewed these photos on a regular basis. When I first started taking photos, I wasn’t the best. These photos were quite ugly eg. too much exposure, too dark, too blur, not in focus etc, but they were still telling of the highlights of my experience in India, South East Asia and more.
To be honest, it’s not that the digital footprints of these photos have been wiped out from the face of this Earth because I have uploaded some on Picassa and Facebook. (The better ones that is).
But that peaceful sense of ‘I can always look at these photos if I want’ is now gone. Even though there’s a 80% recovery rate, sometimes I get error rates for 100 pictures in a row and I wonder to myself if there was a shot worth commemorating that I had missed out on.
Well, as with most things in life, there is no use fretting over the impossible. Will give myself and that blue had disk some rest, and press on tomorrow to retrieve all the travel photos.
I guess on the bright side, it means that I’ve got to pull out that trusty DSLR of mine, and go on taking photos again.
Therefore, The Travelling Squid will be on a short hiatus, for this week perhaps. Will be back to share with some updates on my hard disk if you care to listen.
In the meantime, do enjoy the song by Coldplay, it’s one of my favourites, and does seem to be very apt for the moment now. And before you do that, do back up your travel photos : )
