Preserving Your Digital Memories - 4. Store As Your Shoot

The most nightmarish scenario for any photographer – a memory card failing in the middle of a travel abroad played out in my recent trip to the fabled ruins of Angkor Thom. In that calamity I lost close to 600 pictures, most of which were taken the day before. No amount of coaxing could revive the SD card. It really took me by surprise as it is made by Sony and I had only used it half a dozen before. All the card readers I tried could not even detect the existence of the card when inserted. 

​When I consulted a UK-based data recovery company, their explanation was that the electronic components have somehow been fried and therefore it was not possible to recover. They did however offer that I send them the card for testing. If they are not able to recover, it would not cost me anything. If, however they were to be successful, I would need to pay around 200 pounds for the recovery effort.

Since then I have been revising my work flow and acquiring pieces of hardware that I hope will reduce the impact of this catastrophe.
Had I been more diligent and backed up all the photos from the day’s excursion before I went off to sleep, I would have lessened the loss. It was fortunate that the SD card failed an hour into the morning and we have just reached the foothills of our intended destination.  Had it occurred later, the loss would have been more immense.

So this is now my new workflow:

• In the most extreme of circumstances and for my most important photo shoots, I will be using the dual memory card feature of my Sony A7RIII, mirroring the photos into each of these cards simultaneously.  That way, if one card fails, I am still able to retrieve the pictures from the other card. I very much doubt that both cards will fail at the same time, but if that happens, then I must be the unluckiest photographer in the world.
• For my travel pictures, I now back up the memory card immediately upon reaching back to the hotel or whichever place that is most convenient. For this I need the services of a very fast and rugged portable SSD, and the one that suits my needs the most is the SanDisk Extreme Portable 1TB SSD. It is capable of 550MB/sec (Read speed). There are 2TB versions but for most of my short jaunts, I usually do not exceed 1TB of photos. 

• My arsenal of SD cards are combinations of the Sony and SanDisk SD-XC II UHS-II capable of 300GB/sec reading and writing speeds. A rough gauge would be about 4 pieces of 128GB cards worth of pictures in JPG and RAW formats, plus the odd video shoot as the maximum capacity that I would need.

• To complement the SSD, I use an Intel i7 laptop equipped with a pair of USB 3.0 ports, hooking one to the SSD and the other to a high-speed SD card reader. The one I found to be the fastest around is the SanDisk Extreme Pro SD UHS-II Card Reader/Writer capable of 500MB/sec thus matching the speed of the SSD.

• If time permits I use the Pioneer BDR-XD05B Blu-Ray reader/writer to make a second back-up into BD-XL 100GB M Disc media. This is the same equipment as described in Part III of my series of Preserving Your Precious Memories.

Hopefully this new workflow will lessen the impact of an SD card failing.