7 Ways to Keep Your Sanity When Your Camera Card Fails

At some point in your career as photographer, you will have technical difficulties. If you have a great digital asset management system in place, it won’t happen often. But at some point your camera card or your hard drive will fail. The question is what are you going to do about it?

I’ve had this happen to me twice in my thirteen-year career. The second time was last week, a full day of video shooting was gone. I was going to miss a deadline and it was my fault. I had a choice. I could curl up in the fetal position and bang my head up against the wall or I could deal with the situation.

1.     Do NOT panic.

2.     Purchase Data Rescue® 3 .  (They aren’t paying me to say this).

3.     Run all your cards to see what is recoverable.

4.     If your images are truly gone, now is the time to cry, kick yourself, and get over it.

5.     Contact the people this directly affects, be professional, and be honest about the situation.

6.     Reschedule the shoot and compensate all necessary parties out of your pocket.

7.     Deliver a stellar product as fast as humanly possible.

How do you deal with loosing media? What software/tools do you recommend?