Memory miscellany
Filed in Ancillary kit - May 14, 2008I had a CF card fail on me yesterday. Nothing lost (except the card), because it was an empty card that I was putting in a camera for use. Neither that camera, nor another camera that I could temporarily borrow recognised it as a card. Dodo.
It was a one gig Sandisk Ultra II. Probably quite old. I haven’t been using CF cards much recently as what with my sofobomo project being film and my favoured digital using SD cards there hasn’t been much call. Consequently I can’t remember when that particular card was last used or what it was used for. It may have been sitting around for months and months.
In rummaging around for another card for the photography that I was wanting to do right then, I found an even older card at the bottom of a box with….wait for it….a whopping 8 mb of space. Oh my. History. It is Nikon branded and dates from early 2000. It is, of course, now utterly useless except for proving that it was the other card that had failed and not the camera. At the time it was something of a gamble. Would I use this new fangled digital camera enough to warrant buying a second card for it?
The card failure has come at an opportune moment, because I was planning out a photo trip later in the year and thinking of just stocking up on cards and not carrying any hard drives or computers. With mid-quality SD cards now running cheaper per shot than film they can be thought of as relatively disposable items. Just not when they are full of photos, thanks.
At least with cards each 2 Gb, or whatever, risk is independent of the rest. I mean in comparison with transferring everything to a single hard drive. I guess with cards that are looked after reasonably well having one card fail whilst sitting at the bottom of the bag for a couple of weeks would be bad luck. Having lots of cards fail would be freaky.
I’ve written about this is a slightly different context before, but the question of risk here is an interesting one. With film, one takes the photo and then drops the roll into a bag. Sometime later one retrieves the bag from one’s luggage and then trusts the local lab, or worse, the post office to some distant lab, to take care of it. With digital I have this urge to take backup copies immediately. Probably just because I can. I know that in long term storage not having digital backups is dumb, but in the short term how much gear do I want to carry to make an SD card a safer bet than a bag of film?
Beautiful photo. Is that the M8 or the DP1? Just trying to get a handle on which camera you are using!
We (generic we) back up because we can. We (Jana and I) lost around 12 rolls of film from a trip in Chile that got lost ‘in the post’, more likely the FCO! The debate about using cards like film for storage rather than a single drive is an interesting one: the cost is allowing one to go in that direction and (assuming one doesn’t wish to look at/edit photos whilst travelling) even if slightly more expensive might be outweighed by risk mitigation.
May 14, 2008 @ 10:52 am
Colin,
I know what you mean by that urge to back things up straight away. I don’t know why but I get the distinct feeling that there’s an ephemeral nature to all my digital stuff.
I think the following generations may well have to lament the passing of that old “cardboard box” full of old family photos feeling.
May 14, 2008 @ 12:44 pm
I must admit I am generally not too worried about having backups when I’m on the road. I have reached the conclusion that losing any particular shot, or even a week’s worth of shooting, is not going to make my life noticeably less happy or fulfilled in the long term. I guess there would be moments when I wish I had some particular shot I remember taking, but that happens already – all those shots I have ever “missed” are also gone forever. Hence I know I can deal with a bit of disappointment every now and then (for example, every time I review a day’s shots). I’ll do backups if it’s not too hard, but I won’t worry if it’s not feasible and I won’t usually carry noticeable extra weight for the purpose. Knowing what I can accept has been good for my shoulders and back, and even if shots are lost there’s still the memory of having being there and having seen whatever the process of shooting may have helped me to see.
Of course, backing up the photo database at home is a different story. I wouldn’t be comfortable with a significant risk of losing all my accumulated work at one stroke.
May 14, 2008 @ 1:45 pm
Given my experience with film developing vs card death, I’d say the film is riskier even if you have no backups of the cards. The potential lossage is bigger with cards, though, because they hold so many more pictures.
Strangely, when I shoot 4×5 I feel compelled to take more than one exposure of everything, just in case I screw something up. Then I process them all in batches of 6, negating any protection from processing errors (which for me are more common than picture-taking errors).
I think the backup urge is surprisingly rational. We feel compelled to make backups as long as it’s reasonably easy, but as soon as it’s difficult or impossible we stop worrying about them. It’s essentially impossible to make backups of roll-film, so why worry?
Or is it that by chimping the capture becomes more real – you know you have the exposure right and some idea of composition. With film you don’t know you got it until it’s developed and you get it on a light box. Losing something real hurts more, so you’re more inclined to back it up?
May 14, 2008 @ 1:53 pm
I have an even smaller 4Mb CF card lying around. I cant even fit one RAW image from my camera on it. Woohoo for progress.
I’ve actually used it a few times to play a constraint driven game, to stop me banging away and filling up a 4Gb card. Take just the 4Mb card. Make as many images as I want in a given day, but I have to delete the previous one to make room for the new one. Certainly forces you to really consider making a shot or not :)
May 14, 2008 @ 3:32 pm
John – that’s the Sigma.
JohnJo – I’ve been doing the thing with the cardboard box and photos (and other ephemera) from the 1980s and 1990s over these last weeks. I am very glad they existed, and can not imagine browsing data archives in the same way.
David – the rational part of me is with you. But that doesn’t stop there being a little nag at the back of my head saying ‘ought to back up…ought to back up’.
Erik – I’m not sure that the chimping thing makes that much difference. Experience tells me that I’m disappointed by the shots that looked great on the lcd so, on the whole, I don’t look except for exposure evaluation.
Gordon – well I’ve just thrown away an old Psion ssd card measured in kilobytes. But no camera would have accepted it. Physically it was the size of a stack of six SD cards. Woohoo for progress :-)
May 14, 2008 @ 5:29 pm
I like to look forward and whole heartedly concur with Mr. Grundy. If I ‘lose’ a roll of film (or digital equivalent) then I’d move on and shoot something else…but that’s not much relief for those once in a lifetime destinations. However, I’m working in an environment where financial risks are a daily part of my life. Playing those risks keeps me comfortable shooting film rather than digital: I wager that the likelihood of a fire burning my negatives is a whole lot less than a drive failing me (I’ve experienced one of these events). But take this with a pinch of salt as I come from a profession that seems to experience quite frequently those ‘once in a lifetime’ events.
Talking of black swans…I remember playing computer games on less than 16K of RAM and enjoying the experience. The passing of time and the increase in available memory has not increased this enjoyment though.
May 15, 2008 @ 2:00 pm