"I'm backed up baby..." Photo: Hilary Camilleri
I’ve said it before, but it would be remiss not to mention it again: Back up your data.
Sad reminder of this again when I saw a recent story on PetaPixel about a guy who is taking Apple to court over lost baby photos, saying the failure of a storage device caused him to lose priceless memories. Perminder Tung used an Apple Time Capsule to back up his photos. The Canadian man claims that the device failed and that Apple subsequently told him that data was gone forever. Tung, a lawyer, says the data included the birth of his child and is now suing for $25,000 to compensate for the lost memories. Sad. But is this really Apple’s fault? Hell no. Drives fail. As photographers and filmmakers who depend on the retrieval of data not just for nostalgia – but for our living – we must accept this fact and take the necessary steps to avoid being int the position of the forlorn Mr. Tung.
This is one of the most important fundamentals–not just for professional photographers and filmmakers like us–but for anyone with valuable digital content that’s worth backing up. You can review my workflow video on how to back up your data here.
The workflow video I hinted at above, under the link “said it before” walks you through steps you can take to NOT be this guy. This may well be the most important behind-the-scenes video we’ve made, not because it’s fancy or sexy, but because it covers arguably the most essential information on a set of topics that every photo and video person should understand: workflow, storage and backup of your precious images. This video covers all the ins and outs, the theory and the details of our complete photo and video workflow from capture to archive and everything in between. It’s a tad dated, given some updates in technology, but the theories are crucial and sound. So whether you’re a seasoned pro, an aspiring amateur, or just starting out in photography or video we’ve worked hard to make this worth your time.
___________
Too cute baby photo: Hillary Camilleri and Angela Smith
one of the reasons why some people are going back to film. film is immortal.
Unless it gets lost, drowned, burned, etc. Backup copies? Not without loss of quality.
Of course you could scan every frame, then you’d have digital copies you could back up and — oh, wait….
Unfortunately, this is yet another example of people looking for someone else to blame for their failures.
In this particular case, the idiot in question is a lawyer, so he decided to file a frivolous lawsuit blaming Apple for his failure to adequately back up his data. This would be like my leaving a cup of water out in the sunlight all day and then suing the cup manufacturer when the water evaporated. Drives fail! Back up your data, folks!
(you don’t have to use as elaborate and expensive a set-up as Chase uses… you can simply buy an external hard drive and copy things over onto it! Not quite as robust, automated or convenient, but for most people’s needs, it’ll do the job just fine!)
It’s…. not like that at all. In addition, everyone reading this article assumes that this guy must have been a professional, tech savvy photog….. he sounds like a normal guy to me.
Um, no. If you read the article, it very clearly said that he is an attorney, not a photog… not that it matters: if he was a photog it would be even more inexcusable for him to not have his data backed up properly.
Any tech-savvy person knows that hard drives die. They have fragile metal parts that spin at very high speeds. And they die. Sometimes they die quickly, sometimes they perform for years before dying. But they always die. That is why you always have your data on more than one drive. The fact that he lost his baby pictures was his fault and his fault alone.
The drive might have died but, I don’t know if apple time capsule uses a proprietary file system that can’t be read anywhere else, he could pay a data recovery service to have the data restored because if it was a simple drive failure then it’s quite easy to restore.
Hi Chase,
I think the link to your workflow is broken?
If it was not on his computer, then it was never “backed up” on the Time Capsule in the first place. That should be fairly easy for Apple to counter. This is America nowadays though — the culture of blame and litigation where no one takes responsibility their own failures.
He’s Canadian.