What’s the worst thing that can happen to a photographer?

So, what do you think the worst thing that can happen to a photographer is? Find out someone is stealing your images and selling them as their own? Having someone smash a window on your car and run off with your bag of gear?

I am going to suggest the worst thing is finding out that some of your images have gone missing.

Guess how I came up with that idea? Yup.

While working on that minor site update I just posted about, I was looking through my Lightroom catalog — and suddenly realized the image I wanted to do some reprocessing on had no RAW file. That’s bad. So I went into my time machine backups, and it wasn’t there. So I logged onto BackBlaze, where I keep my cloud backups, and which keeps all files for a year after deletion — and it wasn’t there.

That, my friends, leaves you with a feeling I hope you never get to enjoy.

I have spent the last week or so, on and off, looking into Lightroom to understand what and when this happened, and checking all of my “drawer drives” to see if one of them happened to hold copies of things I could recover the RAW files from.

What I have found is that, sometime in the 2020 timeframe — which so happens to be about the time I moved my site to SquareSpace and of course did a massive amount of reprocessing of images to bring them up to snuff for the new site — I screwed up and set some of my master RAW files for deletion, and then deleted them.

The good news is it’s not a large number of files (although I don’t know exactly how many yet, but < 100, maybe < 50).

The bad news is that now all I have of those images is a JPG processed image to use in the future, limiting my ability to tweak and reprocess down the road.

The good news is — those JPGS are well-processed and high quality, and for most uses, will be all I need “for a good while”.

But the bad news is — I screwed up, and while I don’t know exactly how, I can say with some confidence working on a lot of images quickly and pushing myself to hurry very likely contributed to me getting sloppy, and I set the delete flag on the wrong files, and then pushed the button.

This is not a failure of my backups; they worked exactly as designed. This was pure and simple user error, an error I didn’t notice for two years, and the backups were only set up to be recoverable for one.

I know I’m going to hear from the “this is why I never delete a file” crowd, and if that works for you, awesome. But if you’re like a number of photographers I know, that means you have 18,000 images on a hard disk somewhere, and if I asked you to find a specific image out of that group, since you never content tagged them either, you’d just look at me and change the subject.

In the almost 16 years that I’ve been taking digital images, this is the second time I’ve lost images. The first time was in 2015 when I lost a single file.

I always try to be careful when working in Lightroom; obviously, I’m not perfect, and no system is infallible. I’ve been thinking about ways I could use some smart folders to warn me about this, but to be honest, there are too many perfectly valid reasons for my to have a JPEG or a TIFF without an associated RAW for a warning to ever work reliably.

I have made one change: I was already paying the extra $2/mo to BackBlaze for the one year storage option for the computers. I’ve now changed that to their forever option for another $2/mo plus some very small data storage options. And I’ve had them ship me a drive of all of the files in my current backup with them, so I can spelunk that a bit to see if I’ve missed something (I don’t think so), and I’ll put that in a drawer as a permant checkpoint of my files as of this moment. I will probably do that every year or two just so I can them in case I ever need to go spelunking again…

As someone who takes backups really seriously — I’m bummed this happened. But as someone who takes backups really seriously, I also realize that they aren’t perfect, because human error will always win against well-designed systems. It’s not something I’m going to beat myself up over; it’s something I’m annoyed at and will just go make new, better photos to fill up the empty spots again. This mistake was small enough I didn’t notice it for two years, and that puts it in perspective to me. A bit.

Mistakes happen, I made one. And we move on.

But to everyone reading this, it’s a reminder that mistakes CAN happen, and to be wary and careful as you work on things, and that you really do need to make sure your backups are working properly and cover the content you care about keeping.

When was the last time you checked your backups are working properly? I can, in all honesty, say mine are working exactly as designed…

And that I don’t really think I need to change them. I just need to continue being careful to minimize the chances of future human errors like the one I pulled here.