Simon Ridgway Photography

So I finally sat down in front of my Mac to put some pictures in the galleries on this site and my “Western Digital My Book Studio Edition 1TB external hard drive” (catchy name) decided it wasn’t in the mood to show me any of my pictures. Now, this is not a disaster, since I have all those pictures backed up on DVDs stored safely in another location. However, 1000GB of pictures would take me an awfully long time to copy – one DVD at a time – onto a new hard drive. Oh dear.

I’d already decided that if ever I got it to appear on the desktop, I would run out of the studio straight to my nearest PC World and buy whatever 1TB drive they had to get the stuff off quick smart.

So I desperately tried everything I could think of to get the drive recognised by my Mac Pro workstation. No go. So I tried my Powerbook. No luck there either. I tried booting up the Powerbook into Mac OS10.4 instead of the usual 10.5. Nothing. I tried connecting via Firewire, USB, SATA. No files.

Then it just appeared on the desktop like nothing ever happened. I’ve no idea why and I don’t care – the disk is going straight in the bin once I’ve got the files off it. The time of this miraculous event was 7:40pm. PC World closes at 8pm. I wasn’t going to make it, so I found a temporary measure and started copying the files off onto another drive with some spare space.

Now I just need to order a couple of 1TB drives and start a new backup plan which doesn’t involve DVDs. They work, but the prospect of having to sit at my desk feeding hundreds of disks in one by one just doesn’t bear thinking about. My new system will involve three copies of every picture stored on three separate hard drives, one of which will be stored off-site. I also upload all my final selects to my Photoshelter archive in “the cloud”.

Always have a backup plan.

And this applies not just to digital files but everything a photographer needs to run a business. I have a backup camera, spare lighting, more CF cards than I need, spare batteries for everything, two computers and the list goes on. Being a professional photographer is an expensive business. That’s why hiring a professional photographer is not supposed to be cheap. You really do get the service you pay for.