What’s The Best Way to Recover Deleted Photos?

If you accidentally delete some photos of your memory card or hard drive, all is not lost, even if you used the “Format card” command. A lot of people don’t realize that when files are deleted, all that is destroyed is the “map” that tells your computer (or camera) where to find the data for the photos. File recovery software can perform scans of your drives or memory cards and rebuild that “map”, essentially bringing the files back from the dead. Yes, even if they have been removed from your trash! One thing to note about this process is that …

Read more

New SanDisk Extreme Portable SSDs Look Cool!

It looks like SSD pricing has really turned a corner this year and I’m seeing products that are less then half the price, and half the size of the ones that were on the market last year. G-Technology launched a series of small, USB-C enabled rugged SSDs, and now SanDisk has done the same thing with the Extreme Pro SSD. Since both SanDisk and G-Technology are both Western Digital companies, it’s entirely possible they contain the same drives, but the external styling is quite different. The SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD looks to be significantly thinner than the G-Technology equivalent, and …

Read more

Automated Cloud Backup – I’m Testing CrashPlan For Photographers

I’m forever tweaking my backup routine to suit my evolving business, and refine my workflow. For a long time I have ignored cloud backup services like BackBlaze and CrashPlan because I wasn’t sure if my glacial Canadian upload speeds would work well for something like that. CrashPlan For Photographers Recently I was having a re-think about this though, and since I’ve received so many questions about these kinds of services in the past, I decided to give it a try. Given that a year’s subscription to CrashPlan for unlimited uploads is only $59.99, it’s not the end of the world …

Read more

Backup Routine Revisited

I’ve just had another drive failure here in the office and this always causes me to stop and think about my backup routine.  I haven’t lost any data in the incident but I like reviewing things every now and again and reminding you guys how important this stuff is.   The drive that failed was my primary boot drive for my 27″ iMac.  In fact it was a $600 SSD which in theory should last much longer than a regular spinning disk drive.  In reality it lasted less than a year before catastrophic instantaneous failure.  Never trust a drive.  SSD …

Read more

Hyperdrive Colorspace UDMA review.

This past Autumn I was in Mexico on holiday. I took my newly purchased Canon S90 camera with me and was having a great time snapping pics with that little thing. The quality of the shots coming out of that tiny thing was really blowing me away. I wasn’t traveling with a laptop computer so my photos remained on the camera’s memory card. Unfortunately, on the fifth day of my trip, my camera was stolen while I was in a restaurant. This was the first time I have ever lost photos and I was truly gutted, more so than I ever thought I would be. I didn’t give the camera a second thought, but all I could think about was all the photos I had just lost. When I got back home I started to look into some possible solutions to this problem in the future. Sometimes it’s just not practical to travel with a laptop, so how do you keep your photos safe?

Read more

Backup Backup Backup.

I thought I should wirte a quick post on the importance of backing up your files and photos from your computer. I’m writing this from an internet cafe, the hard drive from my computer has terminally failed for the second time in less that 12 months. Hard disks are mechanical, all mechanical things will eventually fail, theres no question of that. Its just a matter of time. When will they fail? For the most part you can never tell, but they will, trust me. Now, im not panicking about this, I am very careful about backing up my files so