Today was the Columbus Color Run 2012 race, a great 5k race where you run through paint stations where dried color “paint” is thrown at you. Great fun, very colourful and an ideal opportunity for taking photos and video. I was there for about 3 hours before and after the run and took several photos. Towards the end, my phone suddenly asked me to put an SD card in the memory slot. I thought this was odd but maybe the card had filled up. Resetting the phone didn’t help. When I got home I took the sd card out, put it in two card readers and neither of the readers would recognise that a card had been placed in the slot as far as the computer drive letters were concerned (it detected the card was inserted but no disk was mounted – not even an unformatted disk).
Needless to say I was really annoyed as I had lots of photos and video on there that I hadn’t even seen yet. As it turns out, the quality of most of them wasn’t very good – shooting through ziplock bags is not recommended. I’m going to have to try plastic wrap next time. Anyway, this evening I remembered that I had Dropbox installed on the phone – this automatically synchs photos and videos taken from the phone up to the dropbox servers and then downloaded to your other dropbox client pc’s. Sure enough, when I checked my dropbox folder – all the pictures and videos had been synched – I had recovered all my photos. Needless to say I’m VERY pleased.
Note that you don’t have to synchronize videos and if I remember right the defaults are only to sync video when on a wireless connection but fortunately I had turned this to sync on wifi and 3G 😉
If you’ve not used Dropbox yet, then I highly recommend you check it out. It will allow you to backup contents of your phone automatically (and if you process the photos on your computer they will already be there when you get back to the computer – no need to fiddle with hooking the phone to the computer). You can also use it to keep your documents stored offsite safely – even if you only have one computer, you still have a copy in the cloud that you can access from a webpage if required.
The good news, it is even free to start with – you get 2gb for free and we both get an extra 500Mb because I referred you if you use this link to Dropbox
Incidentally my Columbus Color Run photos are on Facebook here – you don’t need to be a Facebook member to view them.