Iconic Photographer Jacques Nadeau Gets Robbed of His Life’s Work
Jul 16, 2015
Allen Mowery
Allen Mowery is a Nationally-published Commercial & Editorial Photographer with over 20 years of experience. He has shot for major brands as well small clients. When not shooting client work or chasing overgrown wildlife from his yard, he loves to capture the stories of the people and culture around him.
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I’ve had hard drives crash, and chances are, so will you. But it wasn’t a hard drive crash that left Montreal photojournalist Jacques Nadeau depleted of his life’s work.
Earlier this week, a thief (or thieves) broke into Nadeau’s home and stole five hard drives with an estimated total of 30,000 to 50,000 images captured over Nadeau’s 35-year career.
“People can take anything here in my house but not that, not my pictures,” said a dismayed Nadeau who plans to start rebuilding his portfolio.
Honestly, it’s gotta suck…
Backing up is great, but…
We hear a lot in the industry about backing up our photos, duplicating files in the field, and workflow redundancy. But, that isn’t enough. As this tragic incident exemplifies, all the backups in the world won’t make a difference if they’re all sitting in one place. What happens in the event of a fire?…or a flood?…or a break-in?
I’m a huge failure in this regard. My goal is to regularly dump files onto external hard drives that then get physically stored off-site, like in a safe deposit box.
Last year I had a huge scare. Due to a series of storms rolling through our area, we had out power thoroughly knocked out about 36 hours. I borrowed a generator from a friend (because I have yet to buy one, even after countless outages over the years), hooked it into my panel box, and threw the switch. While checking things around the house to make sure they were working, i saw smoke curling out from my office desk. Panicked, I rushed over to find the cord on one of my hard drives (containing a lot of valuable data that wasn’t all backed up yet) melting. I was afraid I had lost it all. Fortunately, after replacing the cord, I was able to bring everything up without a problem. (Still not sure what caused it…)
Instances such as that, or like Nadeau being robbed, make a strong case for having physical hard drives stored elsewhere.
Can’t online backup work?
Sure…but it can be a pain. Depending on the amount of your data and your Internet connection, it can take a figurative or literal eternity to backup your files initially. But, it’s still a very viable option that’s work exploring.
Physical Prints
When all else fails, it’s always great to have physical copies of your images in the event of a disaster. However, as Nadeau discovered, if they’re in the same place as your hard drives, it might not make a difference. Along with his hard drives and TV, he lost physical copies of some of his best work, including a black and white iconic photograph of former premier René Lévesque playing pool. “I have 20 prints [of that photo] in the world, just to give to my friends,” Nadeau said.
I can only begin to imagine what he must be feeling right now, and I can only hope that his images are somehow recovered. Yet, if nothing else, at least let us take a lesson to implement and utilize a bulletproof backup workflow…and not be so darn good at our jobs that our work becomes the target of those who go bump in the night.
[via CBC News]
Allen Mowery
Allen Mowery is a Nationally-published Commercial & Editorial Photographer with over 20 years of experience. He has shot for major brands as well small clients. When not shooting client work or chasing overgrown wildlife from his yard, he loves to capture the stories of the people and culture around him.
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8 responses to “Iconic Photographer Jacques Nadeau Gets Robbed of His Life’s Work”
Why in the world wouldn’t you use a simple online backup solution like CrashPlan, Carbonite, Mozy, etc…. They are SO CHEAP especially considering how priceless your lifes work is…. And it’s 100% automated. That is simply just very poor planning and unfortunately a very costly lesson. Backing up files onto hard drives that you keep in your home is not enough because things like fires and theft do happen sometimes.
Also, regarding backing up a lot of files initially and the time involved, companies like CrashPlan have a thing where they send you an external hard drive, you load it up, and then return it and they put it into your backup for you.
I have all my photos on a Drobo, which is a RAID device where I can hot-swap any failed disk. That is backed up hourly to TimeMachine, which exists on another RAID disk.
I use CrashPlan to provide a free backup to my sister’s house, 10,000 miles away. I initially did the backup locally (also to another Drobo), so it took about 2 days to backup the initial 2TB of data. I then took that Drobo to her house, told CrashPlan to connect the backup already started, and now it just does incremental backups daily.
I also have CrashPlan backing up to their cloud. About 3.5TB right now.
All of that is completely automatic. Set it up once and forget it. If you have TB of data, it may take a few months for the initial backup to complete, but where will you be in a few months if you don’t do it??
As Jakobud said, there is no excuse to not have multiple, redundant backups both onsite and offsite. Anything else is a recipe for failure and disaster.
BTW, I forgot to mention, I have been using CrashPlan in that mode for 4 years now. I have had hard disk failures in that time, but I just swap out a dead drive for another in the Drobo chassis.
2 years ago I moved from California to Ecuador, and just moved my system with me. Still trucking, and pretty close to set-and-ignore.
Another example: Francis Ford Coppola had all his family photos stolen in Argentina while shooting Tetro.
How to upload analog pics, 35mm slides to photo-sharing apps: http://t.co/TJq8jG27VF
Cloud backup. I repeat. Cloud backup. I use Crashplan… Works great. I sleep much better at night.
I tried CrashPlan was not happy with its Java-based programs and what I felt was poor customer service when I had issues with setting up my backup. I switched to BackBlaze and could not be happier, excellent process to setup, no java, and great customer service. I highly recommend BackBlaze. I have 2 TB stored their and sleep well knowing my photos, movies and other items are in a safe place.
We have a pair of 32TB Synology Silos at the office which back up to Glacier (Amazons cheap deep storage) it was trivially easy to set up and worth everything of the 200 bucks a month for the peace of mind if the office simply “went away”.
Yes it took us nearly a month to do the initial backup on our 100mb leased line, but you can ship Amazon a hard drive or 6 to do as the first upload. Since then its been gravy.