June 30, 2008

Russian roulette - Part 2

Yesterday I lost about 3 weeks of photos, due to my own stupidity.  The last 20 or so photos that I posted here are all that are left of the last 3 weeks.  Most of the Internet Cafes computers in the world are pure garbage, pieces missing, keyboards unreadable, viruses galore.  I had trouble backing up my last 2GB photo card and then I did the unthinkable … somehow I put the wrong camera card back in my camera and re-formatted it.  That was it.  Two seconds later all of the last 3 weeks was gone.  Uruguay, southern Argentina, Mexico.  Gone.  I was sick. 

At least I have the 20 or so photos posted here on ‘snowfree.tumblr.com’. 

If there are lessons to be learned here they are. 

  1. When travelling you can not rely on Internet Cafes.  Most have viruses and most do NOT have DVD drives.
  2. Back up often.  Not easy … photo stores that can burn DVDs are not always as close to where you are staying as you would hope.
  3. We didn’t bring a computer, but we should have purchased one of those tiny PCs to do a daily backup of photos. 
  4. Bring more camera memory cards than you need.  More is better.
  5. Before re-formatting any memory card have someone with higher intelligence than yourself verify it.

What’s done is done.  Maybe I can resurrect some of the photos from the re-formatted card.  I doubt it but who knows?  At least the posted ‘tumblr’ photos are still available.

Warren McBride