I managed to carry my gear for the entire last month without any damage, but Sunday night at the train station my camera back fell off my other baggage down on the ground. I hurried and checked my camera gear… everything O.K. *phew*.
Today I wanted to copy my images from the mobile HDD that I had to carry with me (because I didn’t have a Laptop with me, Thanks Dell!!!) to dump my images from the cards to it whenever possible. But… Click – Clack – Clack – Clack. DAMNIT! Headcrash!!!
Well, you can imagine that I was about to throw the HDD out of the window, but then decided to make a copy of it using ‘dd’ first. ‘dd’ went through the first 50GiB without any problems… but then the HDD started clicking again. I was able to recover some photos from the unfinished dump and there is still 4GiB of photos on one of my SD-Cards, so cross your fingers! Hope it’s just the video clips on another partition that I lost!!!
What does this tell us? Always have a backup!!!
On my past trips I always had one copy on my Laptop and then dumped the photos to an external HDD which I carried in another bag. But without a Laptop this wasn’t possible this time.
Here’s what worked best for me in the past:
- Import and copy your images to Lightroom as usual
- Close Lightroom, go to Finder/Explorer and copy your Picture & Library folder to an external HDD
- Store the external HDD somewhere safe
- Now you may format your memory cards
This way you always have two copies of your photos. I also usually formatted the external HDD every night before I copied my backup over. If you’re running Mac OS X you could also use TimeMachine to automate it.
Hi, my name is Chris. I am a wannabe photog, traveler & geek that lives in Hesse, Germany. 
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