Sometimes I feel that I might be a bit unlucky when it comes to technology. I’m typically the girl whose computer displays the blue screen of death without warning the day before handing in a big assignment, the one whose USB stick mysteriously doesn’t show any document when plugging it into the conference hall computer before a big presentation, and definitely the one whose phone will stop uploading pictures to the cloud for no reason at all. If there is a one-in-a-million chance for a critical error to happen to anyone, then you can be sure that it has happened to me. Twice.
I thought I’d tell you about two things that have happened to me in the past couple of years that have reinforced that belief, and I’ll let you be the judges of that.
Story #1: The external hard drive debacle
I am notoriously paranoid when it comes to storing important documents and photographs. But apparently, not enough. A couple of years ago, I used an external hard drive. I’d stored everything on it since 2009; holiday and family pictures, ebooks, research papers, etc. I estimate that conservatively, I must have had over 10 000 pictures on it (I’m fairly sure you already know where this is going).
One day, as I was sorting out my desk, I moved the external hard drive to the lowest shelf of my bookshelf and dropped it. It fell down from a height of 20 cm (8 inches) if even that. Of course, I plugged it in immediately to check if it was all right, and it was not. On it, I had just transferred a year’s worth of pictures, in addition to the other stuff that was already there. I didn’t have any other copy of those files. And now I had no way to access them. Everything that was on the hard drive was gone.
I tried online recovery tools, free and paid alike, to no avail. The photographs I’d taken in Crete were gone, all of them. My series of pictures of the H.M.S. Falcon shipwreck in Langdon Bay, which were very good; gone. A trip to London, gone. A birthday with my family, gone. Everyday pictures of Jon and our cat and the garden, gone. It was as if an entire year of my life had disappeared.
I was very distressed, so Jon suggested using a data recovery company. The price for the recovery was crazy expensive, but it sort of made sense since they had to open the hard drive in a white room and whatnot. On their website, they claimed that their “world-class engineers” had managed to “restore data from hard drives that had spent years under the sea” as well as from “fire-damaged hardware”. The price of the diagnostic was a little under €200 (± $215/£170). The idea was that they’d run an evaluation as to whether it was possible to retrieve the data and depending on the results of that evaluation, we’d pay another €900 (± $950/£770) for them to extract said data and send it back to us. As I was saying, the price was steep, but we were desperate.
Long story short, we sent them the hard drive, which they analysed, then asked us for the €200 I was telling you about, which we needed to pay before they released the diagnosis. We paid, and they told us that they couldn’t retrieve anything. And we paid an additional couple of quid for them to send us the hard drive back (in case someday someone develops better technology). The whole thing took about three months, and it was a complete wash.
It made me very sad, and very frustrated. How come it’s possible to retrieve data from hard drives that have literally burnt, but not from mine after a fall of such a ridiculous height? I’ll never know. And I know it is stupid, but it really prompted a feeling in me that I can only compare to grieving. Especially when it came to the pictures of Crete, for some reason.
Fast forward to the next Christmas, when my dad gave me a very small box. In it was a USB stick which contained all my pictures from Crete. I had shared them with him after the trip and had completely forgotten about it. I cried, of course.
The other pictures are lost forever, but at least, I have those. And now I save all my pictures on my computer, on the cloud, and on an external hard drive — just in case.
Story 2#: The Lens Fiasco
About two or three years ago, I bought an Olympus Pen EPL-8. It was a really cool camera which I really liked because it took decent pictures, had a wifi connection, a flip screen for selfies, and you could control it from your phone to take pictures remotely, which was very practical. Plus, it was compact enough to fit in a purse, as I don’t love having a camera bag on top of my handbag. Also, it was super cute.
Anyway. Last year, after the warranty expired (of course!) I was in Figueres to visit the Teatre-Museu Dalí (by the way, if you’ve never seen it, you definitely should) when my camera turned itself off and on without any explanation. When it came to, the screen was black and it was impossible to take pictures. I checked the Internet, and apparently, it was because the lens firmware had to be updated. I spent the rest of our trip taking pictures with my phone (this happened on the second day) and didn’t think much of it.
In order to update an Olympus camera, you first have to download the Olympus workspace, then use the special cable to connect your camera to your computer, and then let the workspace do its thing. Which is exactly what I did. The update took about ten minutes, and I think I was done. I was so naive.
When I turned the camera back on, the screen was still black and it now showed an error message which said “Please check the status of a lens,” which was new. So I did what anyone would do and removed the lens and put it back. It didn’t change anything. So I did it a few more times, then cleaned the connectors with alcohol, then prayed for a miracle, and finally turned to the Internet, which was full of people having the same problem with seemingly no other solution than “buy a new lens”; so I looked into new lenses, and it turned out that for the same Olympus M. Zuiko 14-24mm 1:3.5-5.6 lens, I had to spend pretty much the current value of my camera.
Apparently, the problem lies with a bad quality ribbon cable, which stops working altogether after about 9 000 shots. I cursed planned obsolescence, capitalism, and Olympus, and finally decided to cut my losses and admitted defeat. So long, Olympus Pen!
I’m now back to using my old Canon EOS 1000D, which I have had for over ten years, and I’m not going to say anything else because I really don’t want to jinx it.
Do you have bad photography stories too? Share them with me so I won’t feel so sorry for myself. Or send cake.
All texts ©Ms. Unexpected. Featured image: Alex Andrews
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