Hard Drive Nightmares

Just a little text update:

Things have been a bit barren on the blog as of late, for good and bad reasons. This summer has been incredibly busy, which has been great, but it's also had it's fair share of hiccups.

A few months ago I lost a hard drive. It was my own fault. Working on a video project and probably pushing my computer too far, as well as not backing up regularly enough, meant I lost all my work from January to mid-April of this year. Not a long time in the grand scheme of things but it turns out I've been really productive this year.

I was stressing about where to send it and how much it would cost and eventually I sent it off to a company called Disklabs who came highly recommended. They weren't very responsive and I ended up keeping them waiting on payment for a month since they failed to get in touch with me after fixing it and I emailed them in desperation the day before going away for a month. We went to Copenhagen and had a great time and I kept on being productive and when we got back I got the hard drive back.

I took the recovered data and moved it to an older (and bigger) hard drive with all the new work too. Stupid mistake. The next day that one died too and I'm currently waiting for a quote from a different company since Disklabs stopped caring once they had my money. They're no longer highly recommended in my book.

This new company is taking its time in responding to my inquiry though, so the problem continues to drag on and on, and it's surprising what effect failing technology can have on your productivity and self-esteem. Taking pictures isn't so fun at the moment and every time I take a few and decide to edit them I'm filled with dread that it might happen again. I'm now backing things up obsessively but the blog will continue to be barren for another month or two it seems.

Tomorrow I'm off to Beacons Festival which has felt like a long time coming and it's great how many familiar faces are going to be there. Also, I'm going to be shooting on film like the last two years and thank God you don't need to back up negatives.

Mattxx