It really was ages ago. I was fairly new in my professional career and I was shooting a wedding outside of Austin; a perfectly beautiful yellow and navy blue wedding as the daughter of the small town’s pastor was getting married in the most quaint little country church.

I was new to digital at the time and still getting comfortable with its intricacies so when I came home to download my trove of  images, my heart sank as I saw images of the bride walking down the aisle with her father and then the bride and groom coming back up the aisle. Nothing else in between. There are so many emotions that hit you at once – horror, fear, doubt, you name it.

In the early 2000’s there were barely any data recovery programs, let alone companies with special clean rooms & magical abilities to come to your aid. I called the media company first, explaining the situation, begging for help. They told me to call my camera maker and I made a second terrible call, more begging and feeling utterly helpless. Finger pointing ensued as neither company assumed responsibility so I meekly called my bride and explained the situation – through a bevy of tears. I still had one teeny tiny possibility, some primitive data recovery software that ended up recovering a handful of additional images.

A thorough retrospective revealed what went wrong and created a massive change in my processes – from the way I handled my media cards on the wedding day to my file backup process hours, even years after the event.

So what did go wrong? Both companies agreed there was a compatibility issue between the media and the camera. One of those things that “just happen” they said. Files wrote and rewrote over themselves until recovery became impossible. At the time, I was merely deleting cards but both companies agreed that a full format in camera was the way to go. Formatting, check. They also threw in this nugget: never delete images in camera as you go. Deleting = bad, check.

I spent years on photography forums afterwards touting the format function and dissuading newbie photographers from deleting in camera. The truth is that even fastidious formatting and avoidance of the delete key is not always enough – cards go corrupt due to both user error and  mechanical failure. When a colleague of mine lost a card of portrait images last summer that threw us both for a loop. Here she was – the most diligent camera-turner-off-er and card-formatter that I knew having to make that same scary phone call. Her card was unrecoverable, but you can say that she as fortunate enough that it was only a portrait session. Only.

We spent hours pouring over the rumors and specs of the soon to be released Canon 5D III, which promised dual card slots. It was an expensive upgrade that we both knew would be worth every penny. What do dual card slots mean to a photographer? Backup, hope, the possibility of not having to make that dreaded phone call. Both of us acquired two of them as fast as we could get our grubby little hands on them.

Last weekend, while backing up my images from my wedding, I noticed that one of my CF cards was acting strangely. Two card readers, two computers, and a check on the camera all revealed the same information – the card was unreadable. Errors everywhere as I calmly went through  a mental possibility list of how to get 1739 images back. Let’s write that out in case you didn’t carry the decimal correctly: one thousand seven hundred and thirty nine images. I was looking at a 32 GB card that was moments away from being nothing more than a totally useless paper weight.

Are you panicking for me yet? I wasn’t. Because a few close feet next to me sat my SD card, with every single one of those 1739 images completely intact.

There you go. The confession of a photographer who didn’t panic.