Tech Gripes

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Jumping on the tech discussion bandwagon this morning: there is nothing more frustrating than a hard drive crashing. Particularly the one where you have all your current video projects and music files. It's no rare occurrence, and it's happened to many a professional videographer before but ... goodness, does it stink.

On the one side, it's a kind of situation where there's not much you can do. Often, resorting to the backup of whatever current projects you have, however old and however much work you have to do to get back up to speed, beats shelling out hundreds of dollars on fixing that hard drive.

On the other side, it's a kind of situation where there's not much you can do. Yes, that's right: the fact that you can't do much to fix it is a double-edged sword; positive, because it'll save you time trying to fix the darn thing, but negative because, once it's broken, it's broken, and that's it.

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Of course, regardless of whether you can fix the decrepit piece of hardware, the fact that it breaks down on you is a nuisance. Suppose you have a video due on a given day, it's on your hard drive, and bam, the drive fails the second you're supposed to present your final video. At best, all you have to do is bring another copy of the video from home the next day ... but at worst, you have to go back and re-edit the most recent edits you did in order to make the final video file again.

Sometimes, it's not just you that's pressuring you; it's other people, too. What if you're doing a video for a client, and they've been waiting long enough for the video. You've got to eat your pride and tell them, directly and honestly, "my drive failed so I'm going to need a few more days to get the video to you". The worst part about this in particular is that it's a lose-lose situation. Whether you lie and say you had a family emergency and thus couldn't finish the video, or whether you tell the Abe Lincoln truth and say your drive failed, your client is going to have a lessened perception of your skills. And you can't blame them: if you say something will be there on a given day and it's not, that's your responsibility; whether external factors impair your ability to meet that deadline is your concern, believe it or not.

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All the while, that hard drive is just sitting there, laughing away in silence.

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Maybe we should go back to tapes. Just saying.