Seconds from disaster...
Adventure photographer, Krystle Wright’s work lands her in some pretty treacherous locations, engaging in some pretty dangerous endeavours. And until recently, her backup regime and digital asset protection strategies could also have been seen as a little treacherous and a little dangerous in terms of their ability to keep her business ticking on should she experience a catastrophic hard drive failure. Below she outlines how she went from “organised chaos” to, simply, organised.
All photographers who have experience a hard drive failure know that without adequate backup systems in place or reliable hardware, their businesses, and livelihoods, are teetering on the edge of a precipice, literally seconds from disaster.
Approach to work
As an adventure photographer, and occasional videographer, Krystle Wright finds herself working predominantly off-grid as she chases expeditions around the globe. Each scenario and each location requires a different setup with her gear in order to tackle the trip and nail the assignment. And it’s tough to follow the same formula in each instance as she needs to factor in a number of variables which change based on the job. These include having a base camp or being constantly on the move, whether she’ll be facing extreme humidity or freezing blizzards or whether she’ll be responsible for carrying all her own gear, or not. “My packing method becomes strict as I can only bring what I absolutely need,” Wright says, “with little room left for any luxury items.”
One item, not a luxury but very much a necessity on any trip, is storage for the material she produces. “On the big expeditions, I am producing a huge amount of content, especially when I am combing both film and stills. And this requires hard drives to ensure I don’t run out of space in the middle of nowhere,” she says. What this means is that she has to be tremendously organised. And any available downtime is typically spent backing media up onto portable hard drives, although this is very much dependent on how much solar power she has stored. Sometimes there is only enough for one copy to be made, which she admits leaves her on edge until a second copy can be made.
The office
Wright’s office is the great outdoors. At the end of 2011, she elected a nomadic lifestyle and packed all of her belongings into a shipping container which is stored on her grandparents’ property in Queensland. Wright says that it simply doesn’t make sense to rent a property somewhere given that she’s constantly travelling, and one year she spent 11 months on the road. With no set routines, where she chooses to set up shop in order to work on her images can be as varied as a tent in the mountains to a local Starbucks for a few hours.
The inevitable failure
When it comes to hard drives, failure is inevitable. With all those moving parts, something’s got to give eventually. From running numerous backup hard drives, from various brands, with no real organised system, it was only a matter of time until Wright’s process fell on its face, and she suffered two particularly crucial failures. The first was through, what she describes as, ‘poor organisational skills’. “I had thought that I had a second backup of a shoot and I cleared a hard drive. As it turned out, there was no second back up, and I basically deleted images where some of them weren't backed up.”
Wright has also have two hard drives fail completely. The impact to her business was significant, and the time and effort to ascertain what had and hadn’t been lost, and as well as get her computer systems up and running again, was very time-consuming.
The transformation
The first to admit that she’s a creature of habit, Wright says that she can sometimes get stuck in her ways, and changing the way she does things is typically accompanied by a certain degree of resistance. Back in 2014, she posted a photo of her temporary office in her brother’s apartment. “To put it bluntly”, she says, “it was an absolute shit show. I had managed to collect an impressive range of different sized hard drives of various brands, and the amount of cords I had tangled up around my computer was the right scenario to encourage a dose of insanity.” Wright now concedes that the way she used to work, and manage her digital assets relied on “absolutely no strategy”.
Something else that had delayed her transition to a new way of working was a reluctance to embrace new technology. “I often feel overwhelmed and question whether I can understand the new devices and set them up properly,” she says. After much research and discussions with colleagues, she settled on Western Digital, although says that a number of the other leading brands, include QNAP, really impressed her.
“I never felt that I could trust the online generic cloud services, but with what I’m now using, the WD My Cloud EX4100, it feels like I now have the right level of security with my images.” The process to move all her media over the EX4100, which houses four 6TB RED drives, running RAID1, took a number of days. And once she’s mastered her new setup, she plans to introduce a second NAS device. “One of the greatest advantages of my new setup,” Wright says, “is that as I reconnect with civilisation after an expedition, once I have a solid Wi-Fi connection, I can literally upload all my new material from anywhere in the world via my computer, or even my phone if needs be”.
Digital storage requirements
Out in the field, Wright uses a number of drives from the My Passport series, particularly the 2TB and 4TB versions that run off a Thunderbolt connection. “I’ve found that a Thunderbolt connection is considerably better than using USB 3.0,” Wright says. Not only is it much quicker, but it’s much more efficient on battery use as well. Depending on the length of a trip, and how much storage she needs, Wright also relies on My Passport 2TB and 3TB drives that use a USB 3.0 connection. Her NAS device offers 12TB of storage, relying on 4 x 6TB RED drives set to RAID1.
Top tips
The best piece of advice that Wright can offer to any newcomers to the industry, is that they should take the time now to establish a routine in backing up their images and key wording files. Those early in their careers probably have a little more time that they can put aside, so getting things right from the start is pretty important. And then it really just becomes another habit. “I have had to learn the hard way,” Wright admits, “and as a result have created so much additional stress for myself. I wish that I could go back and tell myself not to be so careless and casual about something that is so critical to running a successful business.”
Wright also says that it’s important to find a hard drive system that suits your needs the best as it’s a long term investment, and can be costly to switch over. “I strongly advise against using multiple brands. It’s also important to streamline your systems as soon as possible.” One of the critical success factors of her new way of protecting her digital assets is a new-found discipline. “After ever shoot, I purposely set aside time to catalogue and back everything up. Previously, I would let it build up due to excessive travel and make excuses,” she says. “That just created more chaos for me. Like anything, if you can stay on top of it, then it streamlines the work so much more efficiently.”
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