I am well-known among my friends, clients and colleagues as an über geek. I live, breathe and think in gigabytes, terabytes and redundant storage. Of course, that is all secondary to my creative pursuits these days. But a working image maker in the modern, digital world can not afford to ignore the realities of the technological rats’ nest that is known as “media storage”. Years ago, a photographer or film maker’s biggest storage challenge was keeping his negatives, slides, film and videotape dry and fungus-free. In today’s unforgiving world of digital media, one slip-up can lead to a disaster on par with having your studio burn down years ago. So what’s a creative guy who’d like to believe he’s moved well beyond the geek world do? Fortunately, my training an experience has held me well. The horrific list of hard drives you see in the picture is actually what I use. I have almost a dozen hard drives, each responsible for holding my work, a backup of my work, or an off-site backup of my work. Everything I do is in multiple places. And at the moment, if I do the math (ouch!), I have about nine terabytes of hard drives. And a fairly complex manner of mapping exactly what is where.
So be kind to your friendly neighborhood digital image maker. He or she probably has a headache. All the time.