Here’s the scenario:

You’re on vacation or you’re on assignment.  You’ve been shooting for hours or days even.  Everything has been inspirational and magical and with every quick glance at your LCD you see that your photographs are coming along splendidly.

Things always seem bright as day right before a sh!tstorm hits.

Here’s what can happen:

You go home to download your SD or CF card onto your computer and it won’t read!  Or perhaps there are no images found!

If all of your photos from that vacation or assignment were on one card then your hosed.

You’ve got nothing and you likely won’t be able to shoot that event again.  Worse if this was work for a client of some sort.

Think this doesn’t happen?

Think again.  It’s almost happened to me before.  I almost lost a card once when I was shooting a wedding.

I’ve lost images to a card before when I was testing one for a company (I didn’t end up giving them a review BTW because of this).

There are two things to take away from this.

1. Buy the best memory cards you can afford.  Don’t skimp on this part, especially if you’re a pro!
2. Buy smaller cards!  Pretend you’re shooting film and you have to change cards every once in a while.  This will help you hold onto those precious memories should you lose a card or it loses the images.  You’ll only lose a portion not the whole thing!

Of course none of this would be worth much if I didn’t remind you to back up your hard drives every once in a while.  I have mine continuously backing up but I recommend to do a weekly scheduled backup if you upload images to your computer at least once a week.

Anything like this ever happen to you?

Photographs:

Innovention Fountain at Dusk by Scottwdw

359/365 Memory Cards by rakeif