Calm Photos

It’s almost like I know what I’m doing.

Messing around with computer hardware, that is.

Up to about three years ago I was backing-up all of my original digital files - both raw and JPEG - on an external hard drive - a Maxtor 300 GB. However, after experiencing a complete crash of my PC (back during my pre-Mac days) I started backing-up on archival-quality DVDs, using a great little device that I picked-up at a photography trade show, called a Burn Away. From that point on I burned all of my raw files to DVD even before downloading the contents of my memory cards into my Aperture library.

However, that still left many, many older files vulnerable that were still on the Maxtor drive. Being the lazy person that I can sometimes be, I just let those files be without transferring them to DVD or copying to another drive.

Murphy’s Law came to visit about a year ago. Sure enough, the Maxtor crashed. I did have secondary JPEG files from those images on my Macs, but when making prints I prefer to work from the first generation raw file. Plus there were many other image files on the Maxtor that perhaps on first edit back then didn’t make the cut but deserve a second look, especially when an ad or stock agency sends a request for something that I know I shot four or five years ago but never assigned a file # to.

My challenge was how I could recover all those files on the Maxtor drive without having to send the drive off someplace, only to pay through the nose for drive recovery service.

At last, it pays to read the help forums on some of my favorite pro photography sites as well as pick the brains of the friendly people down at Best Buy.

So what did I do ? I searched for an external drive enclosure kit that would accommodate the older IEEE connection for the 3.5″ drive that was within the original Maxtor unit. The kit came (Macally PHR 100 AF IEEE FireWire Enclosure), I popped in the 3.5″ drive from the Maxtor, hooked it up to my MacPro and bingo-bongo, I had all of my old raw files back again, ready to be imported into Aperture 2.0 for some fine tuning that I was not able to do three or four years ago when the images were first captured. My Mac didn’t even require me to re-format the old drive.

The problem wasn’t the actual disk-drive within the Maxtor. The problem was the original enclosure and connections, which just simply stopped working.

An important part of working as a professional photographer in today’s digital environment is learning a thing or two about computer hardware. Just as important as the software, the drives and disks must be carefully managed and protected. All those original raw files are today’s “negatives” and “transparencies,” the lifeblood of the photographer’s workflow and subsequently, livelihood.

Here are some images from my recently recovered files.