“Performing validated data transfers is so much better than hot sex,” Peter Krogh recently told me. Actually, that’s not true. That’s a straight-up lie to keep you reading. The truth is that performing validated transfers is one of many critical tasks required to safeguard data — as in, our images!
I’m not going to lie to you (again, at least in this post). Data validation is a nerdy, boring topic, and definitely not as much fun as hot sex. And so, understandably, very few photographers have a good hold on. However, believe it or not, beginning to get on top of data validation can feel quite satisfying.
The fact is that embracing best practices in data validation is critical to ensuring that our archives of images is safely stored and backed up until the day we die (and long after, if we care). On the other hand, if we don’t take proper care of of our data we virtual guarantee that, sooner or later, we will lose beloved and valuable images in the blink of an eye or, more to the point, the sudden click, click, clicking CLUNK of one of our beloved hard drives dying.
Hard Drives Die, Data Decays, But It’s OK
We all know that hard drives are expected to die, just as one quickly learns that he will constantly get flat tires when driving a busted up old car through the wilds of Paraguay. (That’s another story, but you can trust me that it happens a lot).
One of the many, many "gomerias" - tire repair shops - I visited in Paraguay.
That we know that all hard drives will fail doesn’t seem to help even atheist photographers from relying heavily on prayer in safeguarding our images. Too often we download a memory card of critical images to one single, hard drive, erase the card, plan to back up said drive as soon as possible, and then get distracted by pressing work (or, if we are really lucky, hot sex).
We hop that nothing will go wrong. But something will go wrong.
Continue reading “Taking On Data Validation – One Step at a Time”