Just want to leave a quick note to remind everyone about the importance of maintaining a back up of there files,
I recently bought a portable hard drive to make it easier to transport data from my laptop to my PC and to provide for a duplicate copy of data when in the field. I wanted to work on pictures from my recent Yellowstone trip this evening and plugged that hard drive in and heard a noise i absolutly hate <click>.....pause <click>......pause<click>.....pause

It is the sound of a broken hard drive with a lost read/write head. Many of you will recall a journal entry from June 13 2008 [link] When a 500gb external drive went down on me, that drive made the exact same noise...the drive went down with out any back up, infact the majority of all my images in my gallery that are older than 2008 except for a handful of *.psd files are gone FOREVER. It was a absolutly crushing heartbreaking day to say the least for me.

This time around I learned my lesson thankfully my laptop is still running with the data I need intact. Nothings lost. I refuse to format any card until data is on two physically separate storage devices.

So take my advice, never trust a single source for data storage, get your images duplicated as soon as you can.