April 28th-30th on Creative Live

In The Complete Lightroom Workflow, Jared will show you how to radically cut your workflow time while improving the quality of your product and the organization of your digital world. Jared will teach you how to:

Don't overlook the importance of data backups during tax season

Did you know that 53% of small- and medium-sized businesses have experienced data loss within the last 12 months?

What happens when we lose a hard drive in one of our own servers?

There’s a good reason why so many professional photographers rely on CRU® devices. And if your holiday gift list has a photographer, videographer, or anyone who cares about an easy way to create multiple copies of images, video files, or other important data, the CRU ToughTech® Duo is an essential gift they’ll thank you for.

Last week, I was at the PhotoPlus show where we always hear horror stories about data
loss (the guy whose internal hard drive died, causing him to try to revive it so he can get
his 10 years of data; someone else who is spending thousands of dollars to get client images
from a failed drive; one photographer telling another about the wedding photos he lost).
There's no shortage of accounts from those who learn the hard way about maintaining backup
discipline.

I love New York (someone should create a marketing campaign around that). We were there last week
to exhibit at the PhotoPlus Expo, a gathering of photographers and vendors of all kinds. I had a chance
to walk around one afternoon and use my old iPhone (I must be in the minority of people who like smaller
devices, despite my aging eyes) to get a few images, including the iconic Chrysler building and the
headquarters of my favorite newspaper.

I just got off the phone with past Pulitzer Prize winner and National Geographic photographer Jay Dickman, who was on the road in Dallas, presenting another in his series of digital photography workshops. Jay is a long-time fan of CRU storage devices (back to the days of the devices being sold with the WiebeTech label) and is keen to talk about the importance of backup in a photographer's digital workflow.

He agreed that it's as much or more important than the creative process itself and a lot of care and effort needs to go into ensuring that images are protected and looked after. "I'm sure I've told you this before," he said, "but storing images in a digital format is not an archival solution." What Jay is getting at is that you really need to be conscious of what you want to store, keep it catalogued, and stay on top of your disk drives. Who knows how we'll be storing and accessing these images in the future. (Side note: I was cleaning out a closet in the basement this weekend and found a stash of VCR tapes. While I still happen to have a VCR player, it won't be around forever, and I sure will not be keeping one on hand to view taped episodes of kids shows from twenty years ago.)

Jay is one of several professional photographers we're glad to call one of "ours" as he trusts his work--which in turn, is quite often that of his clients such as National Geographic--to his ToughTech Duo in the field, as well as several CRU RTX devices in his home studio.

The image of the ToughTech Duo was shot for us by Jay, on location in Antarctica.

Yesterday, we learned of yet another data security breach: 15,000 current and former New York MTA employees had their personal data exposed on a CD that was found in a CD drive that had been refurbished and subsequently sold. The employee data on the CD was easily readable, but fortunately for all concerned, the buyer of the CD drive was a technology security official who happens to work for a New York City Transit vendor--and who reported what he'd discovered. People are not always that lucky when their personal data pops up in unexpected places, whether by design or accident.

“I can’t tell you how important it is to know that my photos are being backed up when I’m on the road.” Mark says with conviction. “Before I started using the ToughTech® Duo, I was always paranoid that I would lose my stuff, because it was just on a single little drive.” Now he knows that wherever he is, his Duo is duplicating all of his images, on the fly.