I am surprisingly calm considering I just lost my entire collection of photographs going back to 1999. I spent two hours yesterday organizing them into a more coherent system and then this morning the drive failed just like that.
It's a Seagate internal drive, one of a pair I bought in August 2008, barely a year ago. It had a five-year warranty and cost twice what a one-terrabyte drive costs nowadays. I am thinking: okay, so I lost all the photos I shot so far this year, but the photos that really matter—my travel and model shoots—are backed up to a FireWire external drive. I can start really ruthlessly erasing photo images that don't meet a professional standard of quality instead of cluttering my hard drives with largely unusable files.
My first photo hard drive failed last year which was why I bought the internal hard drives. I am in the process of procuring a workable RAID array. The Qx2 RAID 5 array from OWC arrived defective June 12. OWC has been working on it since then. I suppose that if the RAID array had worked from the start I would have backed up the photo drive which was one of the two reasons I ordered it. No sense crying over spilt milk. The other reason is what I intend to move my work towards: doing videos.
This is not justification after the fact. I believe that the work I have done until today has been a kind of exploration via self-directed apprenticeship in the field of digital content creation. I still have many miles to go but the past year and a half has cobbled together a credible foundation of experience and expertise that I can say I do want to go deeper into this new career field. I just can't see myself going back to what I did for 30 years. It is truly a new era for me.
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