I have been silent for awhile, bad Steven. I have several topics I need to write on, but we'll start with the bad.... very bad... well, quite devastating to me actually.
A major problem with shooting digital and being on the road, it can be expensive to keep multiple copies of the images. I checked into online backups and it would be $3,000+/year for the amount of data I would need, plus you need to have internet access to upload the files.
Hard drives are fragile devices, they can and do break down. I don't know if it is directly related to the flood in Thailand (which is where many companies have their manufacturing including Nikon, Seagate and Western Digital) or not, but I was recently told by two data recovery firms that they are seeing a 15%+ failure rate of new drives within the first year..... Anyways, not easy and still time consuming to make multiple copies if you are on the road, especially if you are camping in a tent.
So, if you haven't guessed by now, I plugged in my hard drive to back it up after returning home and it crashed on me. I lost all but a couple days of images. Thankfully, my Professional Photographers Association includes coverage for data loss and I'm talking with the lawyer who manages that trust, and there might be a solution that will let me go back out for a shorter time to take pictures again. However, I've lost some fantastic and great images, they can never be recovered.... So so sad....
