Part 2- after the shoot- Download and backup approximately 1 hour
You’ve just spent the last several hours with shooting your heart out in a myriad of different conditions. You always try to for-see what the shoot is going to be like however they rarely goes as planned. Over time you learn to adapt as necessary and overcome most if not all obstacles.
The first and absolute most important thing I do after a shoot is backup, backup, backup. The camera I shoot with uses the tried and true Compact Flash format for memory. In my opinion CF is the most solid, durable, reliable, and versatile format of flash memory. At one point my preferred card was the SanDisk Extreme 3 4 gigabyte card, I have recently started using PNY Pro 4 gig compact flash cards. They are just as reliable a little faster and much less expensive.
Most shoots (particularly weddings) require multiple cards to complete. I always have on hand 8 4 gig and 8 2 gig cards giving me 48 gigabytes of space to cover the subject at hand. This is almost always more than enough, even though I always shoot in RAW format.
To backup the shoot I plug each card into my CF card reader and copy the files to my working hard drive. I utilize what I consider to be a “hyper-redundant” backup system. I utilize 4 500 gig 3.5 inch external hard drives (2 terabytes total) all of which are Seagate Pro E-Sata drives http://freeagent.seagate.com/en-us/hard-drive/external-hard-drive/Free-Agent.html. Three of these drives are working drives and one is in a fire proof safe. I also have 2 500 gig Seagate Free Agent Go drives http://freeagent.seagate.com/en-us/hard-drive/portable-hard-drive/Free-Agent.html, one of which is in another location across town in a fireproof safe.
To make certain everything is exactly the same I use a great program called Vice Versa Pro http://www.tgrmn.com/ . This program makes life a lot easier it allows me to set the parameters for mirroring all drives simultaneously and it will work real-time. In other words, as I make file changes in my working drive Vice Versa Pro completes them on the backups. VERY, VERY important! Never, ever delete anything from your memory cards until after you have a minimum of two backups.
That’s all for now. Part 3 will be the software processing.
Ciao’
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