This is my first blog post, and perhaps there is no better subject to begin with than something that has taught me a rather expensive lesson.

For the past 15 years, I have been filming and archiving wildlife footage from the Kruger National Park. during this time, I built up a collection of clips that became very special to me. Every animal had its own folder, carefully sorted and catalogued, making it easy to find a particular leopard, elephant, lion, bird or other memorable moment whenever I wanted to use it in one of my videos.

I thought it was all safely stored on external hard drives.

I was wrong.

Three of my hard drives have now crashed, taking with them some of the best wildlife footage I had collected over the years.

At first, I was devastated. Not because they were simply files on a computer, but because many of those moments could never be recreated. Wildlife doesn’t perform on demand. You cannot simply return to the Kruger and ask a leopard to repeat the shot you captured five years ago, or an elephant herd to recreate a particular moment at sunset.

Those memories, those encounters and those images were gone.

Eventually, however, I accepted it as “just one of those things.”

It has also been a timely warning.

I work on an old PC running Windows 7 and use Premiere Pro CS6—the last version of the software I could purchase outright, rather than paying a subscription that I simply cannot afford. My system may be old, but it has served me well and, thankfully, there is still a little light at the end of the tunnel.

I am 77 years old and live close enough to the Kruger National Park to still have the privilege of spending time among Africa’s incredible wildlife.

There are, hopefully, still some years ahead in which I can continue filming.

And then, quite unexpectedly, I found another hard drive containing some of my original archived footage.

What a discovery!

So, I have decided to start again.

I will work my way through the footage, slowly categorising the clips into the various animal folders. It will take time, but that’s alright. It will keep me busy—and perhaps there is something rather satisfying about rebuilding a collection one clip at a time.

As funds allow, I will gradually start transferring my footage onto external SSD drives. Hopefully, that will give me a much safer way of preserving the new collection.

Although, knowing technology, I suspect there will be something else invented tomorrow that will make today’s solution look ancient!

A word of caution

If you are fortunate enough to have your own collection of photographs, videos or memories that cannot be replaced, please don’t make the mistake I made.

One copy is not a backup.

And one external hard drive certainly isn’t a safe place for ten years of irreplaceable memories.

Keep more than one copy. Keep copies on different drives, and, where possible, keep one somewhere else or use another form of backup. Technology is wonderful—but hard drives can and do fail.

I learnt that lesson the expensive way.

But I am still here.

The Kruger is still here.

Africa is still here.

And there are still animals out there waiting to be filmed.

So, rather than dwelling on what has disappeared, I am going to salvage what I have, rebuild what I can, and gladly share the footage that remains.

After all, not everything was lost.

There are still stories to tell.

And, hopefully, many more African wildlife stories waiting to be filmed.