A Pretty Wild Week

IN BETWEEN my last missive in this space, my computer went and had itself a stroke. Very, very bad. So, they claim that macs aren’t supposed to crash. Well, Steve Jobs, they do... A heck of a lot less often than the old OS 9 did, but still...

Basically, while I was in the process of pulling a few files from a friend’s iTunes, the computer just, well, froze. So did I. Ohgodohgodohgod.

Was this God, annoyed at my attempt at massive copyright violation? Bad luck? If it ‘twas divine punishment, I suspect I have now officially paid for my sins. If bad luck, well, what can you do about that?

It was, however, decidedly bad. The file that tells Apple how this lovely website is supposed to work: gone. My favorites list in iTunes: gone. My iPhoto directory: empty. That last gave me a bit of start, seeing as I had just finished a job. Fortunately, the files were still there. Unfortunately, the files were all corrupted.

Try as I might, there is no easy way to fix corrupted jpg files. Most of the solutions involve wholesale data recovery, which was not an option, really. The programs are fairly good, I suppose, though the ones I used tended to crash on me. I had to bite the bullet and reshoot the job. Thank God it was a portrait shoot. Can’t really reshoot a wedding, now can ya?

But I have definitely learned my lesson: I now have two backups for every shoot. I don’t delete anything off my memory card until both have been downloaded and verified. It takes longer, but I can only imagine what sort of hell I would catch if this happened at a wedding. Death, friends. Death.

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Saturday, June 17, 2006