Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Sometimes technology really sucks

All the video I shot this last half of the summer is stored on a portable hard drive that just decided to stop working. It was fine one day and then I went to plug it in and nothing. No magical lights, no being recognized by my computer, no noise from it. It may as well be a rock.
Sometimes you just have to hate modern technology.
Thankfully the unit is under warranty. I am going to attempt to decipher the instructions to save the data and hope that it works.
 I don't want to name names but the unit really looks a lot like this.

Lets hope they can fix it and I don't lose hours of video that cost thousands to collect.

Now before any of you video pros tell me that I should have it backed up on 2 hard drives blah blah, the day you figure out how to fit all that on a bike you get back to me.
There was a finite amount of space and a finite budget for equipment. One of the quirks of small indy productions. You use what you have.

 Getting back to my gripe about technology. Over my many years of working with computers I have marveled at the leaps we have made but often at the expense of reliability. I'd rather have a slower computer that I knew would not freeze, die or crap out suddenly with no way to breathe life back into it than to have something that is faster including breaking down faster!

At times I think we are reverse engineering stuff from the Roswell crash and may not really understand it. Judging by some of our human behaviour I really doubt we have the intelligence to come up with some of these items on our own.
The offending drive has been sent in for data recovery. Lucky for me I discovered much of my footage still on my camcorder! Here is the latest episode until I unlock the rest of my files from my pocket "Borg"
There is a new one coming  very soon. Stay tuned.