Wildlife Photography across the Water: Hardware-Hard Drives

Saturday, 28 February 2009

Hardware-Hard Drives

With ever increasing mega pixels giving us larger and larger files, the PC hard drive soon fills up and every starts to run very sloooooooooooowly, which is a complete pain.

So what to do?- well the best thing is to take all your images off the PC and put them on an external hard drive. These have gone up in capacity and down in price over the last few years so there is no need not to have one. In fact you should have a minimum of two as you will need a back up just in case one of the drives fail, which in time it will- guaranteed.

I started by using Lacie 250GB hard drives and after a year or two, one failed so I replaced it and after a year or so the other gave up the ghost. Now this isn't a major problem as the images were always backed up. For the last couple of years I have used Western Digital 500GB external drives. These so far have been fine but they are nearly full so I have just added a 1TB drive and will replace the other 2 x500GB drives shortly, I like to be safe so I have a 1TB harddrive on my PC and a 1TB external drive added to this I have a back up drive and a back up of the back up which I keep off site just in case a scumbag decides he wants to take them whilst I am out or if the house should burn down I am covered-or at least the images are.

Over the top maybe but as I make a living out of photography I don't want to loose all the hard work and lovely images that I have captured over the years, I know some people burn them to disc but I have heard too many stories of DVD's corrupting over time so for now the external route is the way to go for me, Don't think it will never happen to you, PC's crash all the time and its very expensive to get somebody to recover data-easier to buy a couple of decent external hard drives and sleep at night

Dave

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Bio's

David Courtenay, a self taught wildlife and nature photographer, has been capturing images for over 30 years. He has had a passion for wildlife since early childhood and remembers being glued to the television whenever Survival, Wildlife on One and other natural history documentaries were shown. In the 2006 he swapped his established career for the life of a wildlife photographer, such a move demands a measure of uncompromising passion and commitment.

David has travelled extensively throughout Europe as well as spending more than 7 months in India working with local guides and trackers in search of Bengal Tiger, Asian One horned Rhino and Asian Elephant. He has also photographed Wildlife in Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, Sumatra, Africa, Canada and America. Working closely with Conservation companies he tries to raise funds to help Wildlife that has been put on the endangered list by poaching and habitation loss

Martin Dyer has had a passion for avian wildlife since childhood, particularly raptors. Photography was also another keen interest and it was with the specific availability and control of the whole process that digital offers that Martin was then able to combine the two in 2003. Based in the UK, Martin is a regular visitor to Scotland, specifically the Isle of Mull to watch the Eagles resident there. Other trips to Europe and around the UK are usually part of Martin’s agenda in a typical year.

However, as a firm believer on making the most of the local patch, Martin has spent a lot of time and hard work creating a wildlife garden which is reaping the rewards with many new species and varieties of wildlife. A keen member of a number of wildlife photographic groups, Martin is keen to expand his portfolio into other areas of wildlife, and has already established a wide portfolio of images of fungi.