Have you ever lost a digital image?

[Ilovemycam]

Was looking for a certain RAW file and could not find it. Had JPEG for it, but nothing else. Looked on BU hard drive and not there as well. Luckily had SD card that was not erased as yet and found it.

Have you ever lost your files like this? I'm going to have to shape up.

 

[480sparky]

If you shoot digital long enough, you will lose images.

 

[Mully]

You need to be a detective, even check your backups to make sure they did transfer.

 

[ewick]

Something I have learned and sure everyone on here will agree with me: Organize and back up your back ups. I know it sounds like a pain in the butt but trust me it is so worth it.

 

[fjrabon]

yeah, no transfer -> storage -> backup method is completely fool proof. More often than not, it wasn't hardware failure, it was just user error.

 

[kundalini]

 

[snowbear]

Not only back up everything, but regular testing to make sure you can restore those backups. There's nothing worse than finding out your backups are no good when you really need them.

 

[bratkinson]

The times I have lost images have been my own fumble-fingers after my initial download. I shoot RAW+JPG, download to my computer SSD drive WITHOUT deleting them from the SDHC card. Then, once on my SSD, I make my 'first cut', viewing each JPG with Windows Photo Viewer, and simply delete both the RAW and JPG if it isn't, at first glance, a keeper. On occassion, I find my moving 'fast' has resulted in the wrong RAW being deleted. Typically, I don't discover this until sometime during 2nd or 3rd processing cycle when I think: "where's that photo of...".

As fjrabon above indicated, not deleting the images from the card until ALL selection and processing is completed has saved me every time. Now my only problem is remembering to format the card before I use it for another shoot.

It should also be noted that my workflow produces 4 distinct folders, each with a full 'set' of processed pictures, the output of every step. That way, if I need to back up 1 step, or 2 steps, or whatever, I still have it. I copy daily all 'current, in process' shoots to a 16gb thumb drive I keep in my pocket until everything is 100% put to bed.