White Screen of Death on M8

[edlbell]

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Backup: Copy the DCIM folder to your hard disk. Remove the SD card from the reader to prevent mistakes. Then burn the folder on a (or, with really important stuff, two) CD. Only then start opening your files and processing them. If the copies are OK you can format the card in the camera.

 

Using CD as a backup is NOT a reliable method. CDs of any quality has a high failure rate. A better method is to back up to another hard disk.

 

Ed

[gibran]

Using CD as a backup is NOT a reliable method. CDs of any quality has a high failure rate. A better method is to back up to another hard disk.

 

Ed

 

There are plenty of reliable archival grade CD-R's available which are rated as having far greater archival life than a hard disk(100+ years for Mitsui Gold in fact). Hard Disks are not a good long term back up at all in fact. Best back up scenario in my opinion is to use multiple back-up options stored in different locations. Hard Disk back up for short term, CD and DVD for longer term(multiple copies stored in different locations.)

[ustein]

>Best back up scenario in my opinion is to use multiple back-up options stored in different locations. Hard Disk back up for short term, CD and DVD for longer term(multiple copies stored in different locations.)

 

Have it at least on 2-3 different physical disks and media.

 

Uwe

[kobold]

Jaap---my workflow exactly, and since the beginning days of digital and many different camera, no lost files and no SD or CF card problems.

 

And I echo Sean's advice, and add that using a card reader (taking the card out of the camera and not connecting the camera to the computer) achieves faster thoughput (assuming fast reader) and a more stable workflow (you are not tempted to delete images off the card!).

 

As well, I am not a fan of deleting images in-camera, either. I don't know whether this is just superstition, but I feel that not doing this has helped avoid the problems described above, and other related to the storage media. 2 ¢'s worth, KL

[Guest guy_mancuso]

I always reformat a card before I use it. Really the best advice on this is get a system going from inserting the card to reusing it again after shooting, downloading and all that and NEVER deviate from your workflow. If you do I guarntee you will make a mistake and lose images if you do one thing different in your process

[Guest rubidium]

With the DMR, I consistently note that if I do anything but simply copy the contents of an SD card to my PC then I subsequently get flaky performance when returning the card to the DMR. As a result, I've learned to never delete a file or files using the PC, nor to open a file or files with any application on the PC. Doing anything but a simple copy is inviting trouble - trouble, however, that I find is always fixed with a reformat of the card in the DMR.

Jim

[jaapv]

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Using CD as a backup is NOT a reliable method. CDs of any quality has a high failure rate. A better method is to back up to another hard disk.

 

Ed

Forgot to mention: when on the road I always copy my card onto a XSdrive each evening.I've got my files scattered all over different places. Helped me too, when I lost quite a bit in a hard-disk crash. It took some finding but I collected everything from a multitude of CD's,laptops and the XSdrive and did not lose a single file.

[marknorton]

If you think about it, the microprocessor in the camera is having to recreate the FAT16/FAT32 file systems found in a PC and will have to handle the same sort of space allocation and file fragmentation issues which Windows has to. It's better then that you keep things as simple as possible by reformatting the card in the camera after use. Constantly deleting and adding new files, especially of varying sizes is the most likely to give you problems and losing power while you are writing the card is Bad News.

 

As regards backup, copying your data to a hard drive from a card will be an order of magnitude more secure than a card but it's only a matter of time before your hard drive fails and you lose everything on it. The question is "When?" not "If?". Think of hard drives as a temporary storage medium and you're not far off. You keep ahead of the game by backing it up.

 

Backing up to CD and DVD is a hassle. A CD will hold, what, 1/3 of the contents of your 2Gb card and a DVD about twice that.

 

Best solution is to backup your hard drive to another hard drive. You can buy cheaply (much less than the cost of a Leica lens) a box which contains 4 hard drives running what's called RAID 5. Here, by sacrificing 1/4 of the capacity, the information is spread across the hard drives so that any one of the drives can fail and the information reconstructed from the remaining three.

 

I use a ReadyNAS NV (Infrant Technologies), do a full backup every month and an incremental every night. There's space on it for 60000 pictures. I sleep easy at night.

[gibran]

A redundant raid hard drive is certainly better than a single drive but is still a long way off from being fool proof as regards a long term solution. Yes, CD's and DVD's are a pain, particularly if you wait and have to back up a large raid at once because you have not invested the incremental time to do proper backups. Even with whatever the current technology is, you can figure every 5 years or so having to migrate that data to current technology. I still have Syquest and Zips for instance from over 12 years ago with images on them. Of course, I have long since moved that data to CD, then DVD and so on. In the end, Redundancy in your entire back up system stored in different geographic locations is the key to a reliable, mostly fool proof system.

 

 

If you think about it, the microprocessor in the camera is having to recreate the FAT16/FAT32 file systems found in a PC and will have to handle the same sort of space allocation and file fragmentation issues which Windows has to. It's better then that you keep things as simple as possible by reformatting the card in the camera after use. Constantly deleting and adding new files, especially of varying sizes is the most likely to give you problems and losing power while you are writing the card is Bad News.

 

As regards backup, copying your data to a hard drive from a card will be an order of magnitude more secure than a card but it's only a matter of time before your hard drive fails and you lose everything on it. The question is "When?" not "If?". Think of hard drives as a temporary storage medium and you're not far off. You keep ahead of the game by backing it up.

 

Backing up to CD and DVD is a hassle. A CD will hold, what, 1/3 of the contents of your 2Gb card and a DVD about twice that.

 

Best solution is to backup your hard drive to another hard drive. You can buy cheaply (much less than the cost of a Leica lens) a box which contains 4 hard drives running what's called RAID 5. Here, by sacrificing 1/4 of the capacity, the information is spread across the hard drives so that any one of the drives can fail and the information reconstructed from the remaining three.

 

I use a ReadyNAS NV (Infrant Technologies), do a full backup every month and an incremental every night. There's space on it for 60000 pictures. I sleep easy at night.

[marknorton]

I don't think migrating all your data to new technology once every few years is unreasonable but you certainly need to do the migration while you can still read the old data. As soon as the media or the means of reading them goes bad, you're lost.