This past spring, I had one of those nightmare situations happen in my photography business that we never want to have happened to us. And I am hoping that today's conversation helps avoid this for maybe some of you what happened was a client of mine who I have been working with for over 10 years now she is one of my member clients. She actually now lives in Maryland. So she's about a five hour drive from my
house. And every year I go drive up to Maryland and do her family session, she contacted me and said, great news. Instead of having you come to Maryland, we're actually going to be on the North Carolina coast with my extended family. And I was wondering if there's any way that we could schedule our annual session there and include
the extended family. And obviously, whether you choose to allow people to include extended family and all that sort of stuff is a different conversation, totally different. But in this particular client's case, I was excited to see her extended family I had met them back when I photographed her wedding many years ago. And she's a good friend at this point. I was like, absolutely.
So her grandmother was going to be there, her parents who are divorced, but get along well, they were all going to be there with step parents and her sister with her new partner, we're going to be in from Brazil. So this was this pretty amazing reunion of people. But I don't live at the coast. So even though I wasn't having to drive all the way to Maryland, the drive out to where they were going to be staying on the coast is about a four and a half hour
drive. So it wasn't like I was really saving all that much time in terms of the trip didn't matter, I was happy to go out and see her photographing at the coast is always lovely. And I incorporated a little family trip of my own to go out and stay near where she was staying so that I could turn that work trip into something a little bit more fun. So I went out, we had this amazing session, kids were great, the light was amazing, the whole family was able to
like frolic on the beach. I mean, it was it was a really fun time. And I was really excited about the photos, you know, which I was looking at, on the back of my camera, everything looked great, no problem, I get in the car, I drive home, I take the card, that SD card out of my camera, put it in the computer, and I get an error, which you know, sometimes those cards give you errors, I find that SD cards with their little like, thing on
the side. But sometimes it says like this can't be read or whatever I was like It must be something with that. So tried it with a different reader put it back in my camera could still see the photos on the camera, I was like it's fine. When I have had SD cards give me a hard time in the past. Usually it's just a matter of like software needs to be updated or something is going
on. And since I could see the images, I felt pretty confident that they were there and I would be able to figure out how to get them off the cart. But of course, I wanted to work kind of quickly, right? Like I wanted to make sure that I could do that. So I pulled the card back out of my camera, put it back in the different card reader different, tried a different computer, updated all my software. And then finally got to the point where I was like something is really wrong here. I put the
card back in the camera. And now I couldn't see the photos on the on the back of the camera either. And I was like, Oh God, and what did I do? I froze. I was like, okay, can't do anything more with this card. Because I don't want to damage anything that's already started to be damaged or corrupted. So in the course of my you know, panic attack, because that's what happens. I was like, wait, no worries, this is why we have two slots in our camera, right?
So I pulled the other card out of my camera to to just get it off the backup. I was like if there's a problem with card number one card number two, we'll be fine. And this is where the story gets kind of embarrassing, because although I had another card in that slot, many of you who've been listening to the podcast for a while know that I have a relatively new camera, and at the time, it was about six months old. And for six months.
As it turns out, I had been shooting thinking that I had backups with my second SD card that just kind of lives in my camera, when What actually had happened was that I had not set my camera up properly. Or rather, I had never changed the settings in my camera. So rather than recording to both cards, my camera was doing the thing where it fills one up, and then it goes and fills the second one up. So PSA before anything else.
If you have a two card slot and you haven't checked it recently, make sure you have it set to copy to both cards rather than to continuously fill. Then my stomach really tied in a knot. And I was kind of putting out feelers with different people like who have you used before to recover data, that sort of thing. I'm doing lots of you know, Google panic research. And Dana, my marketing person wrote me back and she's not a
photographer. And so I wasn't I was complaining to her because I was just like, oh, I can't believe this is happening. It had nothing to do with my this can't be that hard business. But she was like actually I know somebody who specializes in data recovery. Do you want me to put you in touch with him? And I was like, oh yes, please. So she put me in touch with today's guest Ryan hammock, Ryan ended up walking me through a lot of preliminary checks and steps to see what could happen to recover
data on the card. And to be honest, when we first got on that call, he was like, yeah, no problem. 99% of the time, this is, you know, we're gonna be able to pull this off, we just have to run some software. And he knew what he was doing. So he starts running that and over the course of probably the first 10 minutes of the conversation, I went and watched him go from like, this is no problem to like, oh, you might be part of the 1% of very unlucky people.
Ultimately, I shipped that card off, I was able because that family was at the coast for a solid week, I was able to offer them a reshoot, before I even knew whether I could get those images off the card, I just called her and I said, there's no guarantee that I'm going to be able to get this data back. So while you're all still there, why don't I just drive back out and reshoot the session. So that's what we did. Thankfully, we had a great second session, everything went really well.
But, but then when I did send the card off, they said that they could recover the data, it was going to cost me $2,000. And they couldn't guarantee that they were going to be able to recover all of it. So thankfully, because I had gone out and had a good session, and everybody was, you know, still all the same people etc. I was able to not have them recover that data, I just used the old images, but
it was a painful lesson. And if I had not, and it cost me an entire an entire day, because I had to drive this like 10 hours back and forth and, and reshoot the session. But you know, it could have been worse, right? It could have been a wedding, it could have been a birth, something that I couldn't reshoot. And none of those things happen. So the moral of the story is like, I got lucky.
However, the minute that I, you know, knew that everything was okay, I was like, the lemonade that I'm gonna make out of these lemons is that I'm going to make sure that my entire podcast audience knows better like has some tools in their arsenal so that they can avoid this kind of problem because it is easy, much much, much more easily avoided than it is fixed once you're in
it. So today, Ryan is joining me in a much less stressful capacity to talk about best practices for your data, managing your data, and keeping everything moving like clockwork. Welcome to this can't be that hard. My name is Annemie Tonken. And I help photographers run profitable, sustainable businesses that they love. Each week on the podcast, I cover simple, actionable strategies and systems that photographers at every level of experience can use to earn more money in a more
sustainable way. Running a photography business doesn't have to be that hard. You can do it. And I can show you how. Ryan, my hero, thank you so much for coming on. This can't be that hard. I am hoping that our conversation today will turn what was a an unfortunate scenario for me into something that this audience can hear learn from and hopefully avoid some similar tragedy in the future. How are you today?
I am fantastic. Thanks for having me on. I'm sorry that we met under the circumstances you did.
You know, sometimes what feels like a tragedy at the moment, it turns out to be an opening door. And the fact of the matter is like, my story was not tragic. It was frustrating. It was time consuming. It was you know, stressful, but, but we got through it. And like I said, if we can help other people avoid similar situations or know what to do when they find themselves in similar situations, then perhaps we can call it worth it.
So before we dive into all the nuts and bolts, why don't you give us a background I you know, you were introduced to me by my marketing, sidekick. I don't even know what to say she needs a better title than that. She's the queen of all things marketing for this can't be that hard. But Dana is a friend of yours. So when I called her and I was like, I'm just up to my eyeballs and technical problems. She was like, you have to talk
to my friend Ryan. And it turns out like you've got your fingers in the photography world and everything else. So give us a little bit of your background.
Yeah. So, you know, the goal with what we're doing with Zen flow is we're trying to put an IT professional into your small business, right? So and we're focused specifically on photographers, because it's a niche that's not being met and my background going back into back all the way to the 80s when I was quite young. My sixth grade I started building computers and learned a lot over the years kept That up always as
a hobby. But then ended up with my wife being a professional photographer trying to figure out like, oh, man, I gotta solve stuff for her. She can't be on a slow computer. Oh, you know, she had a birth session on an SD card that just got formatted. And we got to get that data back. And so I ended up learning all these things and adding on to the body of knowledge I
already had. And then it occurred to me, man, there's so many photography professionals who are artists, and they're having to deal with technical issues. And they're in an environment where they don't have anyone. So our goal is to be that person, to be that person for them that you're calling a human being, instead of getting stuck on a tech support line, like you didn't already know how to restart your computer, I mean, come right. So that's kind of the background
here. So you know, trying to meet a need that I think is out there,
I love that the need is absolutely out there. And what's funny to me is that I have been a photographer for 12 years, for at least 11. and a half of those I have been complaining to my friends about, I just wish that I could pick up the phone and call it the way that I used to when I worked at a hospital, like, oh, this thing isn't working, somebody needs to come fix it. And when you are, you know, the boss of all things in your business, you end up taking on these little things.
And Tech is one of the pieces that takes its intrinsic like it you need to have tech in a modern photography business. But it's complicated. It's ever changing, you know, what you need versus what is out there. It's like, am I overpaying my underpaying? Am I you know, and then when there's a problem, it's just a time suck?
Yeah, I mean, time is the big commodity, right? When you choose a career that's based on you establishing more freedom, but you're giving back time in the process, right? I know how long you guys edit, because my wife does it next to me almost every day, right? And sitting and watching you like, like, I feel so bad people like you charge what for photos, I'm like, no, they charge for the hours and hours they sit at that
computer. And if those hours for you are spent watching a spinning disk, you know, while you wait for something or your brushes load slow or your computer's not moving as fast as your hand in your mind can think it's just costing you the reason you're in it.
Yeah, for sure. So good. So let's start with an overview of the primary mistakes that you make, that you see photographers making when it comes to their tech in general. And then maybe we can get a little bit more specific about their data management.
So I think tech in general, most people have absolutely no idea, no idea what they need in a computer. Because in the last 20 years, we've gotten so far away from what the computer actually is. And we've case that devices like our phone where we just throw it away and get a new one every two years, tablets, things like that. But Photoshop and Lightroom, which is what most people's workflows in right are at Premiere Pro, if you're doing video are extremely intensive programs in certain
ways. And so if you don't have enough RAM, that is going to lead to all kinds of problems. And that's probably the big thing, right? People just do not have enough RAM in their system. People call me all the time, I'm out of memory. And what they really mean is data storage. By the way, the two different things. But memory is Ram, right? It's your computer's ability to keep a thought in front of it and work on it right
now. I think of it like my kitchen countertop, if I have a big kitchen countertop, I can keep a lot of things out and work on them all at one time, have a very small one I'm constantly fighting with, it's like cooking in an RV, right? So they don't have enough RAM. Or they're doing it on an old processor. The processor is actually the ability to take that and cook it all right now. Right? So I got all this stuff out. I gotta prep, I want to cook it. But I have a slow old
oven with one burger, right. And so thinking through what you actually need is hard because we've got 50 years now computer science creating new stuff. And geeks love new stuff with new acronyms and new profiles. So it's my job to know all that you shouldn't have to know that. You just need to know what you actually need. And I see people way overpaying. For example, you could get a 32 core processor.
And yeah, it's gonna slay Photoshop, exactly the same as the six core processor would because Photoshop can only use six threads. So it doesn't matter. It's like if you only have six cars driving down a six lane highway, but instead you build a 32 lane road. That doesn't make any sense. You spent a lot of money for something that you can't use. graphics cards are another great
example. Very expensive, but you're buying you're paying for something that the way that Photoshop and Lightroom use them they only use them for very specific processes. And of those processes. The graphics cards are so overpowered for doing them that you could buy the bottom of the barrel graphics card from five years ago, and have like a one or 1.5% difference between something that's two or $3,000. And mistakes in this area are expensive. If you make a mistake, and you buy the wrong
thing. Now you have to start over. I've got a client right now who just sent me a thing. This is my system that I looked at the whole thing. While it was really expensive, and it's not upgradable in terms of its RAM, and the RAM is only eight gigs, you're screwed. There's nothing we can't fix that. So it's this kind of thing you want to get right the first time. That's I
think an important thing. The other thing is like cutting corners on super important things that aren't that expensive, better SD cards, right? If you're buying the fastest, best, most reliable SD card somebody makes like the tough card. It's waterproof and
dustproof. It's an extra $20. If you drop that while you're if you're especially if you're someone who's shooting outdoors a lot, you're in a rugged environment, and you happen to drop that, hey, 20 bucks just saved you how much like what was it cost to get that back, potentially. So buying good gear, because you're a professional, and you deserve to have good gear that saves you time and keeps you away from headaches is probably the biggest mistake I see people
making right up front. And then to not getting advice from people who really know, your cousin's brother who's a gamer might know a lot about computers. But I guarantee he probably doesn't know a lot about Photoshop Lightroom he doesn't understand how they work. And so you might end up with way more than you need. Also a waste.
amazing this is. Again, I wish I had met you a long time ago. And if Dana is listening, I hope she knows that she should have introduced us as soon as she like as soon as she and I this is I know for sure that this episode is going to like blow people's minds open because I'm already learning stuff. I'm like furiously scribbling stuff down. Okay, so because this whole interview came about as a result of a heart failure on my part, I'd love to talk a little bit about
that. Now I know what my workflow issue was, which was that I had not. I mean, I'm embarrassed to say this, I'm hoping that knee being willing to be embarrassed on the to the whole podcast audience helps someone else
that that's life, the more honest we are, the more people connect with us. Right? So we know what happened here. I was gonna point it out anyway. Yeah,
no, I was just gonna say so I have this, you know, it's not even a new camera. This is what's the worst part about this. But I had set when I got my new camera a year, less than a year ago, I never set up the second card correctly, like I was putting the second card in there, but they just weren't, it wasn't writing to both, it was only writing to the one and it was going to be an overflow thing. So the default, I just didn't check it. I you know, now I can kick myself a million times that
I that I never did that. But I thought I was having them backed up. And then I wasn't. And because no other cards had failed. I learned that the hard way. Number one, if you're using a two card system, where your backing, you know, you're writing to both make sure you're writing to both. And then yeah, I mean, obviously using that second slot to back it up. But talk us through a little bit about other best practices for the actual like writing on the cards and then transferring that data.
So obviously, shooting on two cards is, you know, that's pretty straightforward. And that should that should be standard. Right now, most all the modern camera bodies are set up that way. And you just brought up a big point of making sure that it's writing to both because it does have the option. If you had 232 gig cards in there, you can shoot 32 gigs over the photos before it goes to the second card. So make sure you're not in that format, because that doesn't help you at
all with dependency. I think a big thing is to offload after each session. I know a lot of people who maybe they've got four or five sessions on a card, and they haven't edited yet, I would highly, highly recommend getting it off now. Because if you do have a problem, you only lose one. You don't have to necessarily remove the session from the car because then that provides its own form of
redundancy. But if you carried an external, if you carried your laptop with you, are you carrying an external system where you had something else where after a session, you can get that session off and recording somewhere else. Now you have a built in safety for that. So I'm a big believer in redundancy. I think things should be backed up in multiple places and easy to find. If you are quickly removing it from the card. I had someone call me the
other day. They had a hard drive go down they had five or six cars that were full they had two weddings that they hadn't even uploaded they hadn't even imported yet. If we got them all back, but I had to go through five cards worth of data to get them all back, if the workflow was good, you should only be missing one, you shouldn't have five clients to call that you're terrified that you may not be able to get their shit back. So get the data off your cards
quickly. Again, you don't actually have to delete it off the card. There's a few reasons for that. SD cards and all flash memory. If you delete it, but you don't format it, it's still actually present on the card until you have shot new data over it. So it records sequentially, you could just leave it there until you need
the new data. I don't know if that's going to depend on your workflow, how often are you really filling up a card with a single session, probably not very often, unless you're shooting a lot of video, so you can leave it on there. So now it's in both places, but you have a copy already in an external format. So if that card
goes down, you're fine. Now the other thing is, when you are putting your cards actually into your computer, or into your card reader to use, make sure to actually eject those via the interface on your computer before you get them out. 95% of the time, maybe 98%, this is just a made up statistic, you're going to be fine, you're going to pull the SD card out of your reader, no problem. Everything
went well. However, every once in a while what's happening when you hit eject, there's it's telling your computer D power that drive, don't send any more power to it so that when you pull it out, if there's any dust or lint or anything that connects the to the pegs on the bottom where it's plugged in on the pins, you could short it, it's just making it safe to pull it out 99 cents and you're fine, unless you have a broken spin on the bottom. And there's a little bit of dust and boom, and now
you're toast. So with your objection your USB drives or your things, just take the time if you're on Windows, it's simple, you got a file, you hit right click, you hit eject basically exactly the same thing on Mac, right under finder. The other one, of course, you need to have things stored in two locations. Because things happen, especially with old hard drives, they lose, they actually physically break is what
happens. There's like a needle actually spinning on a platter, it's really basically an advanced record player, and they physically break. Don't drop your external hard drives. I can't say it enough, but you really do need to be careful with them. Even the ones that are like made like super tough, there's a physical component in there that breaks SSDs are different, their flash memory, they also can break but it's not normally that normally they get
demagnetized. That's part of understanding your gear and working well with it. But if you have it stored into place, and you have something go wrong, and you can get it back from the cloud, or you have it on the cloud, and your things go wrong in the cloud, too, don't get me wrong, those are datacenters with sure drives those drives fail as well. So make sure you have a physical backup for all your data is well because it's faster to to get it that way anyway. And then last is to have a
really great data workflow. If you always know where your data is, and it's always being backed up appropriately at appropriate timeframes, you're far less likely to have data loss that impacts you, you know, when you have somebody come back, and now they want to buy more photos from that session. And you oh crap, what happened arise from that, if you don't know, even if it's just inefficient, it's costing you time, but it also is leading you to more like loss if you don't know where your stuff
is. So having a really good data workflow, we can talk about that sort of in abstract. But then making it specific to your the way your brain works is what I really enjoy doing with people is helping them get their system. Yeah,
I am glad to be able to say that I think I actually check all those boxes, at least when my camera is set up the way that it's supposed to be set up. But I like to leave a shoot on the card until that shoot has actually been
delivered to the client. So that is one way that I just have like a third backup, you know, so after I've offloaded the card, etc. And that's I judge the number of SD cards I need to own by, you know, if I'm busy enough that I need five working cards at a time or six working cards at a time, then that's how many I have in rotation at a given time.
Right. And I think that's that's a brilliant example of not being cheap on yourself paying for that, right? If you spend the money to have enough cards to make sure that that thing is fully imported. You have an extra backup of it before you have to go back to that card. That's a really smart way of treating yourself as a professional right. And really what you need is maybe five sets, right? Right. So because then you're troubleshooting on each one there's and they get
worn down together. That's actually an important component is cards wear out. So you might want to in your mind based on your volume have an expiration date on them and just write it with a, you know, a grease pad write on the card, like, this is the date I put the date you got it. So you know, in a year, I'm just going to that sets done, right? Retire, give it to your kids for their camera, whatever. But keep it as a complete backup in your bag. But you're now
going to replace that set. And then every couple months, you're buying a replacement set. So you can spread those costs over time. But you're always working on good gear. People don't understand that these do have a maximum rewrite component before they can no longer be read, you know, continue to work.
Yeah, that's super interesting. I don't think that I knew that cards kind of had an expiration date is a year, do you feel like a year in heavy rotation is about the max that you want a card to be put to?
I think the vast majority of photographers can get away with to, like a two year cycle and you're going to be fine. If you're very high volume, then yeah, I would probably look at faster. But if you're very high volume, you should if you're especially if you're listening to your podcast, you should be getting enough money that this is not a problem, right? Like this is a good problem to have, you need to be replacing them more than you can. Because that's going to save you from having these
problems. Yeah,
this is gonna go on my list of even though I am not a big fan of like Black Friday sales and all that sort of stuff. This is going to become every year I just replace on my SD cards. Whenever the big sales happen. Yeah, like
the month before Black Friday, I filled all my carts, like on Amazon everything. And then I just put the alerts and then they whatever goes on that gets.
Nice. So good. Okay, so then yeah, let's talk a little bit about the, the workflow that you mentioned, because I feel like I could probably talk to you for hours. But I'm excited to pay you to do that, instead of just sneaking all this stuff in on the podcast.
Oh, I'm excited about that too.
But ya know, I would love to hear what you give, I know that you do a lot more specific advice for people based on their needs, and what kinds of work they're doing and the kinds of budget they have and the tools that they're using. But I would love to hear kind of your Yeah, your more generic advice for photographers and their data workflow in general,
I always think of a good workflow as being redundant, efficient, and renewable. So first, redundancy means it's built into the system that if something goes wrong, you can recover it easily. And our standard workflow, you got to shoot on the car, you've got to shoot imported, like onto your local hard drive to work on. This is another mistake people make is they're editing from external drives, which is the equivalent of taking a Ferrari and shoving it through a
pinhole. It's just not how it should work, like but having a good internal system drive. And so you've got it in two places, you've got all your raws now, then, after you've finished working on it, now you've got your exported folder, your export is stored both locally on your system drive. And with a cloud backup, right, because your completed work should always be retrievable quickly.
And then every two or three months, kind of in our standard for most people's workflow about every three months, we're going to offload all of your raws onto an external hard drive. So it's no longer taking up system drive space, because again, the vast majority of calls from me start with, I can't even load the new iOS update, I can't load, you know, I loaded it, it just shuts
down, I ran out of room. And so that goes to renewable, but the exported data, then you've now you've got your finished work backed up both in the cloud and a physical location, you have your raws in a cloud in a physical location, or the card in a physical location at the beginning, depending on how it where you are in the workflow. And so then you have all that it's super redundant, we can always get a copy back of what you need in order to deliver for
your client, right? Because that's the call nobody wants to make. Right. Then the second thing is it needs to be efficient, right? I can make the strongest, most redundant workflow in the world. We can have a fireproof safe over here with four raid backup hard drives, and they can you know, they can all talk to each other right and synchro and we can get that back and then we have to, like you know, different clouds.
But that's insane because it's too much track of and it also goes to the efficiency of when you work on your data. We want your data right in front of you. We want it super fast presenting to your computer in a way that isn't slowing you down again, which is why we don't want to be working off external drives. Those are for storage. Those are for putting them in your that's that's putting your stuff Back in the pantry, done cooking, it's not for work time. So we want a very efficient system.
The other thing about efficiency is having a good file structure. So many people have that, you know, my wife mentors a lot. So I see a lot of people's desktop, you know, I see a lot of what your light rooms look like, and they hit this wall of dates down the left side, and how is that searchable for you? Unless you're gonna go back and cross reference, what day did I shoot that on? And what day did I do this? And all those things.
Wouldn't it be better to find and Marie's really awesome photo shoot in the woods, or Emily's really great wedding, something that you can actually know where it is. So having a file structure that as you store it, is doing the organization for you. And we can set that up in Photoshop. So it or in Photoshop and Lightroom to where it basically is defaulting to that. So you don't have to do that work each time. And all you have to do is every three months,
start a new catalog. And when you start that new catalog, now it's going to store so you're storing three month bytes. And all of those files are defined by the clients name, right? So you know where it is, because a big way to lose things is just simply not know what it's called. Yeah. Or where it's being stored, getting that set up. And that's always part of the problem is people start and they just do what Lightroom defaults to. And Lightroom is default file structure is
stupid, right? I mean, it's just dumb. And there's no way to know what's where at any given time. And it's even stored in a folder you can only find, you know, so anyways. So that's one thing. So having it be efficient, and then having it be renewable. And renewability is really important. Because, again, an ideally efficient workflow has you working off of your system drive, but your system drive, you know, when I'm building most systems now is about a two terabyte, local NVMe, SSD drive,
super, super fast. two terabytes is a lot of data.
But you can do a minute Yeah, go through a lot.
Eventually, you're going to run out of space, if you don't have a good way to renew the system. So I look at it as when we're offloading the goal isn't simply to back it up, the goal is to set my system back to zero. So if I have 100 pieces of clothing in my closet, and I have 100 spaces in my closet, then if I pull something out, I gotta pull something out to put something back in. Otherwise, it turns into a giant
mess. And that's where most people are with their workforce, they just, they just went they didn't have a plan for what was going to happen. Another class is full when everything's a mess. If we have a plan right at the beginning of that every three months, I'm basically taking the data that you know, this is my two terabytes, and I'm moving it. Now I just have this little bit, and I have all that free space again. And then three months later, boom, I have
all that free space. Again, I never start running into those errors that make me crazy and start seeing the blue screen. So if it's a good workflow, it's doing those things. It's redundant. It's efficient, and it's
awesome. I don't know if you've listened to any of my other podcasts. But I am a huge fan of the of the metaphors in general. And so you have brought so many good ones with your Ferrari through the pinhole and the closet and the countertop like these are all this pinging, like all the happy points in my brain, which is saying something given that we're talking about data workflow,
or Yeah, I had somebody called me the other day and the touchpad of their laptop wasn't working. And so I helped them take their laptop apart over the camera over a webcam and get down and find out that there was a burned wire in there and replace wear. This is somebody who was so uncomfortable. Like they didn't even know what a Phillips head screwdriver was. It's like, this is fun. And she's like, I'm so unconfident right now. I was like, well, she goes, I don't own that. I go,
will you read that for me? And it's so fun to like, get people through that. Yeah, like, I
Oh, man, this is amazing. Well, I know that there are a lot of people listening today who are like, okay, get to the part where he tells us how to get in touch with him. So, Ryan, thank you so much for coming on. Tell everybody where they can find you and how they can best connect with you.
Sure. So Instagram is always great, because that's where photographers already are. So we are Zen flow tech, on Instagram. I think that's probably in the notes here. And then our website is our main website. We've got a few different brands for our system building and our other things. But our main website is Zen flow tech.com. It's easiest way to get ahold of us. If you really are interested in like having us
be part of your business. The easiest way to do that is we offer a monthly subscription. And what's cool about that is it's 30 bucks a month, but you basically have an IT guy on call. So you don't have to like wait and talk someone who maybe you can't even understand. You don't have to like get told to reboot your system 12 times like you didn't already try that. And I know what your system is, we'll help you through it. And if nothing else, I can log on remotely and probably just fix
it. So for 30 bucks a month, the first $25, every month for the first 12 months, goes towards a new system build, if you're thinking about getting a new computer within the next year, basically, almost all that money goes directly into a savings account for you for that, and you get half off data recovery, you get half of our hourly tech support, if you have bugs, if you just want to work something out if you want data flow, coaching, things like that. So that's how you get a hold of us.
We're very, very quick, we respond
very brilliant. And I can I can tell you from personal experience that Ryan was there when I needed him was super, super helpful, even though my particular problem was not solvable.
Ya know that, you know, that's one of those things you always want to deliver. And then sometimes still curious about laying down with that card. And we'll never know now, but we did try. And oh, that actually does bring up something that's a little bit interesting. The difference between physical failure and logical failure, if it's logical failure, meaning that the data has become corrupted, or it just disappeared, or you formatted
it, or you. That's kind of what happened the first time she just accidentally formatted a card before she'd imported it. She just hit the button. Right. And it's just sure we all have that kind of thing happened. It's just brain fart. We had a little kid at the time. Yeah, we can get that back. Right. If it's a physical card, that needles rattling around in there. I'm going to have to farm that out. But I'll tell you that and it won't cost you anything to learn
Yeah. So super, super helpful, man. Well, thank that information.
thanks so much. Yeah. Have a great day. you again, for everything but But I appreciate you coming on the podcast. And I imagine that this may not be the only time that I've got you on here. So So yeah,
Well, that's it for this week's episode of This can't be that hard. I'll be back Same time, same place next week. In the meantime, you can find more information about this episode, along with all the relevant links, notes and downloads at this can't be that hard.com/learn If you like the podcast, be sure to hit the subscribe button. Even better, share the love by leaving a review in iTunes. And as always, thanks so much for joining me. I hope you have a fantastic week.