Recently I’ve changed my philosophy in CF card use.  For along time now I’ve been a typical user ... I owned a handful of cards, and constantly erased and reused them.  I’ve been victimized by the occasional failure of card, and have physically misplaced my fair share but fortunately have never lost any actual images.  About a year ago, I noticed how inexpensive the “older” type of cards were.  Cards a couple of generations back in technology ... meaning they are slower and smaller in capacity... can be found for around $12 per 4 gig card.  They are plenty fast enough for how I shoot ... no video and no long “bursts”.   I’ve always preferred shooting to more cards instead of to one larger one anyway .... if you lose one or it has a problem you don’t have your whole trip on it.

When I went to Italy last year, I took enough cards to not have to reuse one.  I labeled the cards as I shot, and backed them up to my laptop, but the cards themselves served as my primary “backup”.  I was surprised when I calculated the cost per image for doing this ... far less than it used to cost to shoot and develop film per exposure. 

I’ve always struggled with an efficient backup system for my images and I know most photographers fight this as well. It seems everything you use as a backup can fail, so you have to keep backing up your backups over time.  From everything I’ve read, CF cards are the least likely storage medium to fail from simply being stored (although reusing them over and over can be problematic).

Since that trip I’ve decided this is how I would shoot ... everything goes onto CF cards which are formatted in the camera and never reused.  When the card is full, I label it and then store it in a fireproof safe in the cement room under my front porch (well, as soon as I get the fireproof safe installed). 

Of course these are just the raw files so it doesn’t replace my current backup strategies.  I’m sure those aren’t perfect, but currently I’m pretty comfortable with everything other than in case of a catastrophic problem ... I don’t have a copy of things stored “off site”.  I’m working on that, and I have an article planned on some of the current hardware I use for storage coming up.  And of course there is the problem of everything I’ve shot before fall of 2009, when I didn’t use CF cards like film.  More on that later.

Admittedly many photographers are too prolific for this type of storage ... they just shoot too many files.  Many wedding photographers now think nothing of shooting thousands of images.  I know on a landscape shoot I normally shoot far less than most, so it works for me, but not for everyone.

One other thing I tried was switching to SD cards from CF cards by using an SD>CF card adaptor.  This would have been nice, standardizing on a single card type.  Doesn’t work.  Way too slow.  After maxing the buffer on a dSLR it would take a few minutes to write the data to the card.  On my PhaseOne p65+, it was excruciatingly slow ... not workable at all.  I assume this is an issue with the adaptor, because SD cards themselves don’t perform that poorly in cameras designed for them.

Anyway, I know I’m not the only one doing this, but thought I’d mention it.  Perhaps this isn’t even something you do for everything you shoot, just those extra special shoots ... maybe to some exotic place you know you will never be able to go back to.