A harsh lesson learned. What was I thinking?

Working yesterday at the Jacksonville, IL Steam Show (an outdoor flea market type setting.) Think cornfields with booths/tables/trailers/tractors.

Well, for some stupid reason I had decided to keep a memory card in my pocket (maybe because I had a magnet to check coins in the backpack, and I didn't want to accidentally erase my images? No idea why I even brought it - not like I was going to edit photos there anyway...) On it were edited (finished) images of about 100-150 coins, plus some edited (finished) images from my trip to New Zealand. Maybe about 100 hours worth of work.

Got home, no memory card.

Spent about 2 hours walking around trying to find it. No luck.

Thankfully, I was smart enough to back up the really important pictures (irreplaceable ones from New Zealand or Easter with my family) but now I have to redo all those coins...that are already in 2x2s.

Lesson learned: never, ever carry a memory card in your pocket. Always backup your work when you stop working.

Yeesh!

 

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Ugh...I feel for you.

 

sad news, good luck

 

Ouch, what a lesson to learn the hard way...

 

Well, the problem isn't that I don't have files backed up appropriately. It's in my workflow. I've been editing them ON the memory card instead of transferring them to my HD first, then editing them. I don't know when I switched from a safer way...but I need to get back to a better order of operations...maybe it's because I've been traveling a lot and an SD card saves so much space.

The images I lost are all from the past two, three weeks while I've been very gypsy-like.

I also should never have put that card in my pocket. It should have gone back into the camera or into the Pelican case.

I'm also going to start leaving a txt file with contact info in case this happens again. Maybe someone will be kind enough to return it!

Side note: at least it was my 32GB card, not one of my 128GB cards. Those are expensive...

 

I always back them up. taking pics takes awhile.

 

Leaving the text document of contact info will not only give them photos if all the nice coins but info on where they can steal them. You may want to rethink this or at least be VERY careful of what info you leave.

 

Just a name and phone number or email address. Never an address.

 

Best to carry them in a memory card wallet. As a photographer, that keeps them safe and in your pocket.

 

It has been years since I have been to one of those shows, they are one of the things my dad and I did together a few times, I never thought they would sell coins at them tho, my dad used to have a few old hit and miss engines and him and some friends would make souveneirs with lead mold and some dies and sell them at the show.

 

I feel for you; I've fallen victim to the same scenario, with a variety of media, all the way back to floppies that did get damaged by magnets. (Heck, I've dealt with a dropped deck of punch-cards.) I love the way technology's advance has made it easy to carry around ever-huger masses of data, but few people mention the inevitable corollaries:

1) The more stuff you can store in one place, the more stuff you can destroy with one mistake.
2) The easier it is to carry, the easier it is to lose.

I've got holes in my workflow as well, but I don't do enough "work" of this sort right now to be facing a lot of risk anyhow. I feel better once I've saved to a non-portable destination (so I won't leave it somewhere), a portable destination (in case the big non-portable one suffers a catastrophe), and a remote destination (in case both of the first happen). Honestly, though, most of my stuff hasn't yet made that final jump.

Oh, and for what it's worth, I don't think there's any way to damage a memory card with a magnet, unless you use the magnet to physically crush it. Credit cards with a magnetic stripe are still vulnerable, though.

 

I keep my memory cards in these little padded hard plastic cases that are about credit card size.

 

Someone could have found it - it's always nice to have a text file on the card that says your name and contact info.

Also, check those pockets!

 

But they had a whole other genre of problems - they were very easy to damage. I think I have a couple of them sitting in a box somewhere. Also those 3.5" hard disks and then the 100mb minidisk. And to think I have all that and more on my now 64gb memory stick.

 

No text files with your contact info - ask your bank if you can use THEIR contact info, your favorite teller, etc., anything but YOUR data.

 

Or the 8 inch disks those were hard to lose. Of course they were also annoying to carry, easy to damage, and later once they became obsolete hard to find.

Jeff I've also had the fun of dealing with a dropped punch card deck.

 

IM SO SORRY