1st November 2015. Pebble Island, Falkland Islands.

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More avian wildlife from the south of Pebble Island.

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A pair of upland geese, common in the Falklands.  The male is on the left.

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Upland geese and chicks.

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A temporarily unoccupied nest.  Black and white feathers indicate upland geese.

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Don’t know whose nest this is (both taken from a distance with a telephoto lens).

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Yellow-billed Teal.

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Yellow-billed Teal.

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Patagonian Crested Duck.

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Long-tailed meadowlark (not that you can see the tail).

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Female upland goose being inconspicuous on the nest.

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Silver Teals.

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Magellanic Oyster Catcher.

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Backups

If you don’t have backups, you discover the need for them when your computer or hard disk crashes.  If you do have backups, you then discover how good they are at that time.  In theory, you should have at least two backups and one should be in a remote location (in case your house gets napalmed or drops into a sink hole).

My recent computer crash knocked out my RAID 10 data disk and the data proved unsalvageable.  This meant I had to recover the data from backups (on my Drobo S) and there proved to be holes in my backups.  I had made a mistake in specifying one backup and the files from my 2011 New York trip were missing.  I have also been specifying backups by year for Travel, Festivals and Local Performances and had forgotten to specify 2016 backups for Travel and Local Performances.

I recovered the New York files from a second backup to a hard disk. I did not have such a backup for 2016 Travel or Local Performances but my 2016 travel images including Flinders Ranges, Cuba & the Caribbean and Point Hicks were still on the laptop and its travelling backup disks.  I just lost a few TIFF files of panoramas, HDRs and focus stacking that I was quickly able to regenerate.

I had no backups for 2016 Local Performances though.  For the most part that doesn’t matter.  I still have the web files, most bands only want web images and I probably wouldn’t want to print any of them.  The only exception was the most recent performance of Blues Piano Night, where I have a pending request for full-sized images for a CD.  Fortunately, some of the images were still on a CF card.  The rest were on a CF card from the other camera that I had formatted and started to reuse.  However, I was able to recover those images using Sandisk Rescue Pro Deluxe (this comes free for a year with each Sandisk Extreme Pro card you purchase).

So I didn’t lose anything very significant but have to rethink my backup strategy.  I have too many images for a single incremental backup (takes too long) but clearly defining new backups each year is a potential failure point.  So for Travel, Festivals and Local Performances I will have subfolders for Processing and Finalised which will always be backed up.  I will move projects from Processing to Finalised as I finish them.

I have approaching 240,000 image files so backing up is a significant issue for me.  But no matter how few important files you may have, backing up is not an issue to ignore.