This podcast is for the Huntington Camera Club out on Long Island. Not long ago, I was out at the club doing a judging and I brought some memory card holders as door prizes for anyone who could answer some photography pop quiz questions. And a gentleman who won one of these door prizes laughed and commented that he had a terabyte card. He didn't need a card holder. Well, I've been thinking about this comment ever since then. So this podcast is for the club.
Now that memory cards are approaching capacities of 4 TB, the price for a 1 TB card is dropping. Naturally, these large capacity cards are becoming more and more popular with photographers. But there's a problem that people don't generally pay attention to. Memory cards fail. I'm not saying that large capacity cards fail at a higher rate than small capacity cards. No, not at all. The thing to keep in mind is that all cards have the potential to fail. Everything has a shelf life. And from what I can tell, nearly 6% will fail right out of the box. The hope is that if you have a bad card, your card will fail the first time you use it. Then there's not much to lose and you can get a replacement card from the manufacturer. The problem is that you really don't know when they're going to fail. But when they do, they will fail catastrophically. And the bigger the card, the more images you're likely to lose.
The problem with larger cards is it makes people really lazy about backing up their images on a regular basis. Rather than backing up the images at the end of the day, they back it up every several days, or even at the end of the shoot, which can be a two-week trip on the other side of the planet. So rather than losing one day of work, you lose days and days of work. I met a fellow who went on a two-week trip. And although he didn't need to, he decided to change his card halfway through, and guess what? One of his cards failed. He felt lucky that he still had images from half of his honeymoon. Aside from the card failure due to manufacturing problems, there are also other issues too. What about simple loss? You just lose the card. What if you accidentally spill something on your card and destroy it? There are a number of ways you can lose those images and the bigger that card is, the more images you are likely to lose.
So what can we do? If you're shooting a camera with two card slots, and you're writing to both cards at the same time, you are effectively backing up your images. So you can kinda sorta do whatever you want. After all, you have a backup! The possibility of both cards failing at the same time is pretty slim. There is a possibility, but again, it's pretty slim. But I did say kinda sort it earlier. So here's the problem. Let's say you have two card slots and you're writing to both cards at the same time and you have two very large cards that will last you for your entire shoot, which means you are backing up. But what if one card fails? Then you're down to just one card. If you didn't bring anything to back that up and you keep shooting just on the one card and it decides to fail too, yeah, you get the picture. You've now lost everything. Again, it's a slim chance, but it's still there.
So how many cards should you carry? It all depends on your tolerance for loss. The first question you have to answer is, what is that tolerance? Are you willing to lose a half day's work or a full day's work? Or several days? If you're willing to lose a half day's work, then you better be carrying three cards. One to shoot the first half of the day, and the second to shoot the second half of the day. The third is just in case one fails. The size of the cards will depend on how much you generally shoot in that period of time. What if you have two card slots? In that case, my inclination is that you will need to carry no fewer than four cards. That's two for each slot, so that if one fails, you would put in two new cards. You would not want to continue to write on the good card because that card represents the only copy of the images that you have already taken. Remember, a card just failed.
The fact of the matter is that more than 90% of the good cards out there will do what they are supposed to do and give you tens of thousands of writes and rewrites for years and years. But when they fail, they will fail catastrophically. Ask me how I know. And when I said good cards, I mean the major brands. Do not, please, for the love of photography, do not go with off-brands. I have had five off-brand cards fail immediately out of the box. So back up, back up, and back up.
As they say, hope for the best and prepare for the worst. In the next episode, I'll talk about backing up while on the road. I hope that was helpful. Until next time, keep on shooting. And thanks for having me, Huntington Camera Club. Hope to see you guys again next year.
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