Last weekend, I had a really amazing birthday tour through Napa Valley! It being my twenty-first birthday, I thought that would be a pretty appropriate place to celebrate. I was live Tweeting on my phone the whole trip (@BillTheBeaver by the way) while taking official Bill Beaver Project photos with my camera, and I managed to complete the whole county in one day! It was so much fun! Until I got home…
I take a lot of pictures from a lot of different angles, so I’ve started keeping some spare memory cards, just in case. It never hurts to have too many gigabytes, you know! However, I have to format them before I go on a new adventure, but when you have multiple memory cards, it’s REALLY DARN IMPORTANT TO MAKE SURE YOU’RE FORMATTING THE RIGHT CARD!
Long story short, I formatted my Napa birthday card before I’d uploaded the photos to my computer! There were over 20 historical landmarks on there! Yes, you might very well say I could just use my Live Tweet pictures for my records, but they’re just not high enough quality! So, I have to redo the entire trip!
So, what have I learned? Well, if you do format a card by accident, there are different software programs that can retrieve your pictures… if you don’t take any more pictures on that card, which I did! Therefore, the best course of action to keep the same thing from happening to you is to prevent, prevent, prevent!
- Lock your memory card once your trip is over! The little lock tab in the top left or right corner will keep you from accidentally deleting anything from it!
- If you cycle through memory cards regularly, be sure to upload your pictures to a computer as soon as you can!
- Check what’s on your memory card before you format it! Then check again!
- Label your memory cards, especially if you travel with a lot of them, and reserve certain cards for certain tasks!
- If you really want to go to an extreme, I’ve heard of some people buying memory cards for specific trips and then putting them right into storage after coming home!
Luckily, it will only cost me a few dollars to get back to Napa, but imagine you had just finished a big expensive cruise or taken the last pictures of someone before they died! Don’t let that happen to you! Remember the three UPs: stock UP, load UP, and back UP!