After a rather long hiatus due to an unfortunate flood event that I had, I have returned. It took me a long while to get a working computer back up and running, but here I am.
Fist of all, I have to thank Canon for making an incredibly weather resistant camera and lenses. I also have to thank Sigma for making great water resistant lenses. The outcome of this flood, could have been much, much worse. One thing is for sure, I will be much less paranoid of a few raindrops while out in the field.
So this brings up another issue that everyone needs to think about. Backups! After learning a hard lesson a couple years ago about backing up to more than one drive, I have learned another valuable lesson. Not only do you need to backup to a couple different places locally, you need to have an offsite backup location as well.
Grey Catbird in Waterford, Ontario.
After losing a drive a couple years ago, I learned that I need to backup to two different backup drives. If one fails, I would still have a copy of all my pictures. When it happened to me last time, I lost a lot of pictures due to not thinking things through properly. So since then, I have been backing up to two drives.
I recently filled my two backup drives, and had purchased a couple new 4 TB drives. I had just copied the old drives to the new drives, and thought I was doing pretty good. But the more I thought about the situation, I realized I also need offsite storage in case the worst case scenario happens.
I just started copying my pictures to the cloud storage, and literally only a few folders of photographs copied and my worst nightmare happened. Yes, that's right. The Flood! I was devastated. The worst feeling in my stomach as you could imagine. As I was scrambling to dry things off and salvage as much as I could, I had a look at my computer and drives and they were ok. I have no idea how they survived, but they did. This made me happy and upset at the same time. Happy that they survived, but upset that I didn't start the cloud storage earlier. It was the scare of lifetime. I thought I had lost all my pictures in my collection.
Moon shot from the front yard.
The insurance company has said that my camera and lenses are fine, but of course I had to test that theory out for myself. I have to say they didn't check anything other than turning them on and looking for visible corrosion. Hopefully this doesn't cause a problem later on.
My first trip out was a late day adventure in Waterford, Ontario at my favourite birding spot. Certainly not an ideal time of day to go looking for bird picture possibilities, but yet again the location didn't disappoint. The only unfortunate thing was I could only look at the picture on the LCD screen on my camera because I didn't have a computer to use right away. This was torture.
The second photographic adventure was a few moon shots. I always love night photography, except that time when something was growling at me in the dark, but that's another story.
The latest was getting out during the Perseid Meteor Shower. I only went out to my backyard, but seeing all the meteors was great even if there wasn't photography involved.
Shot from my backyard during the Perseid Meteor Shower, August 2017.
But now I have most of my computer back. Enough to look at my pictures and do what I need to do, while I patiently wait for my house to be put back to the way it was before.
So I pass on to you this valuable lesson that I learned. Always backup your photos to two different local locations, and also to an offsite location. Because you never know when the worst can happen. Always be prepared!
Till next time,