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How Do You Manage Your SD Card Library?
txmadman writes "Like a lot of my colleagues and all of my three children, I have several SD , mini-SD, and micro-SD cards for various purposes: cameras, cell phones, my laptop, etc. These things are handy to have around, offer easy and significant storage, but are very easily lost. We have also have run into some instances where it wasn't clear whose SD card was whose, and have also started to see a need for a storage mechanism. I have seen SD card 'wallets' and such, but have never seen anyone actually use one. So: How do you manage and keep track of your SD cards?"
I horde my digital media! People. Do. Not. Touch. My. Stuff.
Family members taking personal responsibility to know what is theirs and where it is is the only solution. There is no technological substitute for plain-old responsible living.
Putting labels on cards if they know they'll forget is part of that. Putting their things in their specific corners of the shared domicile are manditory. I infest my bedroom and my computer desk. My dad inhabits his desk of the study and his side of the master bedroom. My brother floats between the sofa, the piano, and his room. My mom Supremely Controls the rest of the house, and of course has jurisidiction as to the aesthetics of everyone else's little corners.
Do what you (hopefully) learned in kindergarten! Put things back where you found them! Develop habits! My keys always go with my wallet and phone and PDA on the articulating arm base of my computer monitor. I never wonder where they are: they're either on me, where they belong, or stolen.
Life is very simple when you take responsibility. It's all black and white, easy to differentiate, and on the whole much more pleasant.
Consider yourself spoken to.
Treat your SD cards as garbage! No kidding!
You do this by using a hard disk copy as the "master", and copying to and from SD, considering that the SD is always "ephemeral", and may get bent, may pop out of the device and be stepped on and lost, etc. So, it is never the host for any critical data for very long.
And you make darned sure to back up the disk. These days my short-term backup medium is a couple of 1G or larger SATA disks, which I place in a front-loading holder and put in the fire safe after they're written. Long-term backup media is currently DVD, but will probably go to Blu-Ray when the media gets cheap enough. Some of these are stored in a relative's closet, because having all of your backups in one building is stupid.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
He needs to have a number of cards at his immediate use at all times. Large high-resolution raw-format images are big no matter how you spin it, and the prospect of loosing an expensive card (well, probably less expensive now, but rewind five years and let the horror set in) isn't good.
When you're at a shoot, "oops, I somehow managed to grab ten cards, five of which were full" is inexcusable.
He organizes it by keeping track, putting things in consistent places, eg. full cards in need of download to the computer go in one place, cards that have been downloaded to the computer can be put in another place.
Simple habits can fix most problems of organization.
He needs so many cards because sometimes he doesn't have time to process photos between shoots, and there isn't always time to stop by the store to buy more, either.
And yes, he archives all data to hard disks and what not. Keeping it on flimsy cards that can easily get deleted by a camera's "clear card" function is a horrifying way to loose your customer's data.
While not always avoidable, try to keep critical data off cards. We've all seen photos of cell phones with address books in toilets or the fabled $2,000 latte. Do you really want to be the next /. headline "I lost my SD card in the wash and there was data on it I didn't have replicated - can you suggest any good recovery techniques, or am I basically screwed?"
Consider yourself spoken to.