Handy Information About Your CF Card


 

My Crazy System



I've had issues with my CF card. I shoot in RAW and am constantly copying my files to my computers.

Our family owns our own business, so I actually back up all my files on two computers, one at home, one at work. In addition, both my computers have a backup RAID system. That isn't always full proof, as I have had both my hard drives go out in a very close time frame from each other before. So, I back up to two computers. My husband tells me that my images, especially ones of our family, are priceless, and that I should regularly back up my images to our server as well (triple+ redundancy). Every once in a while I will do that, but generally speaking I think two RAIDed computers is pretty safe.

When my second daughter was born, I didn't have my an SLR camera. I had a G2. It took beautifully crisp pictures for a point and shoot. But, it had issues with its power supply and battery. You couldn't charge up the battery without plugging in the camera. In addition, the charger had a loose connection. Then, once, I ruined the charger, by doing the off/plug-in/on order of operations wrong. Luckily, Canon replaced that for free. On top of that, the battery didn't hold a charge well. So, charging was a pain, and when it came time for my daughter to be born, I didn't have power to my camera. I ended up getting a couple of shots of my newborn daughter by plugging the camera into an outlet and taking a picture attached to the outlet. But, then when I got home, I didn't have this back-up-the-image-at-two locations-before- deleting thing going, and most of those few picture I got were deleted. Oh, I was crushed. Luckily, I had a put a couple of them in a separate location for e-mailing. So, I have a couple of photos of when my daughter is born (but most of them are sized small for e-mailing).

This kind of thing happens to so many people these days...a couple of extra big hard drives for your family computers and backing files up on them should really be considered by almost everyone. If the two computers are in the same location, putting the files on some other medium or on an external hard drive and even putting the medium or the hard drive in a safety deposit box might be in order. As for me, I think I'm pretty safe, come what may, to have my images on two seperate computers at two seperate locations.

What I Just Learned


CF Card Issues



Well, as I said, I do a lot of copying and deleting of files. And I've run into issues with my CF card and have almost sent it back to the manufacturer. But, a technician I work with came up with a solution and that is to do a slow reformat on my CF card (works on other PIN drives too). Of course, you would do this after backing up the files on your CF card. The error I was getting was CF full. However, my old card, just stopped working at all without any message. It may be that we didn't need to send it back, but just needed to reformat it. It's worth it to try that first if your having any sort of problem with your memory card or pin drive. Just put your card in your computers card reader, right click on the drive, and choose format, then choose slow format. (Again, make sure you do this after backing up files as reformatting deletes all files.)

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