Buckjumper's Blog

Where was he background photo taken?

 

Julie

Standon, Herts. The tree line in the valley is the remains of the trackbed of the Buntingford branch.

Oh heck, I'm sorry to hear that. Both the hospital wards and the flooding. One thing is that these things happens to us, but why do they always seem to happen at the same time?

 

From a modelling point of view I can't stand to think what has been lost in your workshop. Tools can be replaced but the models and photos? Argh.

 

But glad to hear you are OK now. That's the most important bit. And the van is a treat, as always!

Fortunately I don't keep models in the workshop overnight, but the room they were in was also flooded. I did have time to move those in danger, but some suffered moved-in-haste damage which is repairable...when I can replace the solder station, compressor, airbrushes, tins of paint, workshop...ad nausium. Insurance covers it all but it's a lot of gyp, especially making a full inventory of the damage and loss (the water was contaminated so salvage is impossible). The only irreplacable items we've lost appear to be our honeymoon photos which had fused together, and the negs were too far gone too. That and my Marshall valve amp - a model no longer made - which has gone to the great gig in the sky.

Good to see you back here posting Adrian, I had wondered what had happened to you! It sounds like you've really been through the mill of late, lets hope it all gets resolved very soon.

 

Lovely to see some of your modelling again, as Mikkel says "the vans a treat!"

 

Best wishes

 

Dave

Thanks Dave.  I've found another useable pic so new post coming up shortly.

Good to hear that the models are (more or less) safe and that the insurance covers it :-) 

 

But a pity about the photos. That's a good thing about digital photos - although I sometimes wonder what happens if the company that hosts our online backup service folds. It's so easy to become dependent on online backups and then forget to make your own backups of the backups, so to speak. The incentive of course is to store the photos with a large global company like Google, but then you face the risk that they decide one day to close down that service if it doesn't pay. I'm interested to hear what a proffessional like yourself does for backup of digital photos?

I'm no professional photographer - I just get lucky from time to time

 

As well as storing digital photos on my computer I back up onto two seperate hard drives, one of which is kept upstairs, and the other isn't in the house at all.

 

I do have some stored on a cloud but are not permenant - just a facility for easily accessing from different devices.

 

I think the main thing to remember is that nothing is infallible. Years ago we all thought various types of storage were the new panacea from floppys to CDs to Zip and Jaz drives, but CDs can degrade after a surprisingly short space of time and both Zip and Jaz were limited and quickly disappeared. Perfectly good, reputable hard drives aren't immune to total failure either.

 

However you do it, a rolling programme of backups and changing the hardware every so often with an off-site backup is going to significantly reduce the probability of total disaster, but I suppose there's no 100% infalible system.

Thanks Adrian for these tips. In my eyes your photos are "pro", whether you make a living from them or not :-)

 

I can relate to your point that nothing is infallible. I have some old hard drives (removed from past discarded PCs) that I have used for storing some of our first digital photos. But Windows 7 onwards won't recognize them (for whatever reason). I'm glad I discovered that while we still have an old computer running on XP, so I could transfer the photos in time!

You're too kind; there's a five bob note in the post to the Kingdom