Data Recovery for Professional Photographers

RAID Recovery – Benefits of RAID 0 and RAID 1 Drives

22 April 2016

The Importance of Data Recovery Services

14 February 2017

smm

Data Recovery for Professional Photographers

Professional photography has come a long way in the last 10-15 years. Gone are the days where analogue cameras and spools of film were the order of the day. Today, nearly all professional photographers make use of DSLR cameras and memory sticks. While digital cameras have done a lot for the photography community, they have also presented a new set of problems. This piece will take a closer look at how you as a professional photographer can benefit from data recovery.

Data recovery is probably one of the single most important services offered to professional photographers in today’s highly competitive marketplace. There is enough pressure on photographers having to document some of the most important days of peoples’ lives without running the risk of losing your data. Any loss of data can be absolutely disastrous for a professional photographer. Can you imagine trying to explain to a newlywed couple that you’ve lost all of their wedding photographs because of a faulty drive?

The severity of the loss will usually depend on how much data has actually been lost. Photographers can lose a single shoot’s worth of work on a memory stick or their entire portfolio on a drive. Fortunately, today there are a number of ways to easily back your photographs up with websites such as Tumblr and Behance which both allow you to upload your work in high resolution.

Should you suffer from a loss of data because of a corrupted storage device it is of huge importance that you contact a data recovery specialist as soon as possible. Any delays could result in more damage to the storage device. Data recovery has helped many photographers across the world get themselves out of very sticky situations. Remember though to always backup all of your data to at least two or three separate storage devices or websites in order to minimise the effect of a corrupted drive.

As you may know, a flash memory card utilizes solid-state memory, as there are no spinning parts like a traditional hard drive. But not long ago, camera manufacturers decided to adopt a variety of competing formats, such as Secure Digital (SD), MultiMediaCard, xD-Picture Card, Memory Stick, and CompactFlash (CF). This created a format war akin to HD-DVD versus Blu-ray or VHS versus Beta. Although they all do the same thing, each had unique attributes and was not interchangeable.

So, how do you pick the right card? Before you make any purchase, find out what your camera supports. Most likely it will be in the SD family of formats if it’s a newer camera. SD comes in three flavors: the original plain-old SD, SD High Capacity (SDHC), and the newer SD eXtended Capacity (SDXC). Each version of SD comes in a variety of storage capacities and transfer speeds, and is priced accordingly. Unless your camera is older than five years, choose a SDHC card over regular SD. (Only until recently, companies like Sony, Olympus, and Fujifilm supported proprietary formats, but have since gone the SD route.) Keep in mind: older digital cameras that don’t support SDHC won’t read from or write to it, even though both SD and SDHC are physically similar in look and size. SDXC cards offer greater capacity and speed, but besides offering more power than most users need, they are expensive and may not be supported by all but the latest cameras.