Another one that seems to have a lot of supporters, yet how many of them have actually thought it through?
The argument goes that it’s crazy to put all your eggs in one basket, because if the card gets corrupted or your camera gets stolen, you lose the lot.
Now let’s just take a look at this one: firstly, when are cards most likely to be corrupted? When the read or write cycles are disrupted, that’s when. And when is that most likely? Whilst changing a card. So what’s the best way of tackling the risk? According to the myth, by limiting the impact of the event, but it’s pretty obvious that it’s better to avoid the event – by not changing cards so often. Which requires a bigger card…
But say the worst happens, and your card is corrupted. In my experience, it’s rare that the whole card is actually corrupted – in fact I’ve never known it. But even if it is, there are plenty of data recovery programs out there that will save the day with most images. So the chances of losing all your pics if your large card gets corrupted are miniscule, whereas your chances of losing some images are significantly multiplied by using lots of cards.
Now let’s look at loss: yes, loss of camera/sole card is catastrophic – so I would recommend backing up images at the end of the day onto a separate device. And carrying a spare card! But to be honest, if you’ve got lots of cards to look after, aren’t the risks of losing one far greater than if you have less to worry about?
Again, this is one for people to make their own minds up on – but after genuinely thinking about it, not blindly accepting dogma.