Photographer offers B100,000 reward for return of life’s work
Phuket Gazette -

PHUKET: A professional travel photographer and boutique resort owner in Phuket is offering a 100,000-baht reward for any information leading to the return of his MacBook and backup hard drive – which contain his life’s work.

Brian Skyum, owner of Coco Palace Resort in Rawai, returned to Phuket after five weeks in the Philippines to find his maid was the only staffer still working for him and electronic items worth reportedly more than 500,000 baht were stolen from his room.

Among the items reported missing were an Apple MacBook, two Canon cameras, a tripod, a Panasonic home theater, a 2-terabyte hard disk, a Canon L series lens, a Sony DVD camcorder and a Samsung TV.

On the MacBook and hard drive were 36 years of Mr Skyum’s processed photography from over 170 countries – now all gone.

“I could survive without the half-million baht of monetary value; the photos are all that matter,” Mr Skyum told the Phuket Gazette.

The widely published Danish photographer is the self-proclaimed “widest-travelled person in the world” and, up to this month, he had the photos to prove it.

“My photography is pretty much National Geographic style documentary. I presented public slideshows for 16 years, so I covered everything in each country,” he said. “It’s not just marking countries off a list.”

If Mr Skyum is unable to regain his life’s work, he plans to sell what equipment he has left.

“It’s difficult to stop something that you’ve done since you were 20 years old. I’ve committed my life to this. I have no family, no children and no wife. I am married to my job and the planet Earth.”

Though two-thirds of Mr Skyum’s photographs are backed-up in his homeland, they are saved only in “raw format”, meaning years of editing and fine tuning each photo is lost – with one-third of his photos completely gone.

“I’m not going to redo all of this again, this is the end of it because I lost so much of my work and tens of thousands of photos are gone completely, both jpegs and raws,” he explained.

Due to being about two years behind processing his photos, there are no other records of his photos taken during trips to various countries over the past two years.

“I just took over 6,000 images in Egypt last September,” he said.

Following Mr Skyum filing a complaint with the Chalong Police, Sub Lt Kraisorn Boonprasop is now investigating two main suspects: a Burmese handyman who was staying in Mr Skyum’s room while he was out of the country; and the Coco Palace Resort manager, who quit four days before Mr Skyum returned from his trip.

“Mr Skyum allowed ‘Mr Dam’ and his family to stay in the room while he was travelling. He gave him the key,” Lt Kraisorn told the Gazette.

“We didn’t find any traces of the place being ransacked and the thick dust in the room made it impossible to find fingerprints,” he added.

When Mr Skyum returned from his trip, his maid, the only staffer still working for him, told him that she had found the key to his room still in the door several days after Mr Dam had returned it to the resort manager and left.

The items missing from the room – in addition to the electronics – were only a couple small things from the minibar, Mr Skyum explained. However, the reception computer and all of the paperwork for the bookings, including calenders, were also missing.

Mr Skyum explained to the Gazette that he contacted the manger, who admitted to taking it home to remove some personal information.

The computer was returned the next day, but had been wiped clean, Mr Skyum alleged.

“I introduced her [the manger] to the [photography] business, my website and database in New York… I offered her 30 per cent commission, which is quite high. She didn’t sell anything, but at least she knows now the value of my collection,” Mr Skyum said.

The Coco Palace Resort, which has been on the market for eight years, was originally built for about 25 million baht, all of which Mr Skyum said was derived from his photography business.

Police are continuing their investigation into the missing items.

Any person who believes they have seen Mr Skyum’s stolen equipment are urged to call Lt Kraisorn at Chalong Police Station at Tel: 076-381247.

Additional reporting by Saran Mitrarat.

Source: http://www.phuketgazette.net/phuket_news/2013/Photographer-offers-B100-000-reward-for-return-of-life-s-work-20471.html

-- Phuket Gazette 2013-03-11

While I sympathize with this guy Brian Skyum, he should know that there are facilities like sky drive, cloud and thumb drives to back up one's life work.

I use Dropbox. A "professional" photographer who carries "his life's work" around all the time without backup doesn't seem very professional to me. Poor sod, his stuff will probably be stolen. Best of luck getting it back ...

If someone knows this person, tell him not to do _anything_ with the computer at the moment.

Deliver the computer to the data recovery expert, who might be able to get the photo collection back.

The chance is that the files are just "deleted" which normally means that the filesystem only removes pointers to the files. The files are still intact on the hard drive, until someone or some program is writing over the places on the drive itself.

There are programs to do the undelete, but in this case I would recommend that someone who have the still protecting the data, even before starting to do the recovery, would take the case.

And yes. Off-site backups should be standard.

very sad to lose yr work like that hope he will find it back soon

he is not waiting i think for anyone telling him what he should have done ,, its done and its gone now try to find it back is the case

very sad to lose yr work like that hope he will find it back soon

he is not waiting i think for anyone telling him what he should have done ,, its done and its gone now try to find it back is the case

You are right. Its too late to teach him, but others may want to take note: It is industry standard for a "professional" or even a conscientious amateur, to keep TWO offsite back-ups... 30 years ago using film a professional would keep original negs, copy negs and original prints at separate locations... in the age of $100 terabyte drives it is inexcusable not to back up.

He had backups on the external drive which was taken also.

If someone knows this person, tell him not to do _anything_ with the computer at the moment.

Deliver the computer to the data recovery expert, who might be able to get the photo collection back.

The chance is that the files are just "deleted" which normally means that the filesystem only removes pointers to the files. The files are still intact on the hard drive, until someone or some program is writing over the places on the drive itself.

There are programs to do the undelete, but in this case I would recommend that someone who have the still protecting the data, even before starting to do the recovery, would take the case.

And yes. Off-site backups should be standard.

Unfortunately, if I understand the article correctly, I think that the computer that was returned was the office computer rather than the MacBook. However, if he does get the MacBook or the hard drive returned, this would be good advice if they have been wiped.

David

He had backups on the external drive which was taken also.

Useless if you keep them in the same location.

As mentioned backup off-site.

Dropbox, Amazon S3, private server, harddrive at a friends place.

Unfortunately too late for him. Hope he gets it back, but the chance is slim.

I use Dropbox. A "professional" photographer who carries "his life's work" around all the time without backup doesn't seem very professional to me. Poor sod, his stuff will probably be stolen. Best of luck getting it back ...

With no way to prove the images are even his, anybody could market the entire collection as stock photography. He would be wise to contact all stock houses and aprise them of the situation, but still, how does he identify and prove which are his? How does he know the manager made no sales?

For photographers doing documentary style photography, cloud backups just aren't practical unless you have an amazing internet connection. He said on his trip to Egypt last September he took 6,000 photos. It doesn't mention which Canon camera he was using, but let's say it's 10 megapixels, which would produce a RAW file of about 30-31 megabytes for each photo. 6,000 x 30mb = 180 gigabytes for just one of his trips. If he's shooting all the time, cloud backups just won't work. A couple days ago I had to upload a 1.8 gigabyte file. It took 8 hours with my standard TOT plan, not to mention getting disconnected plenty of times throughout the day.

If the user have steady 1Mbps (or 0.125MBps) uplink to be used for uploading photos.

The daily uploads would be 10.8GB (0.125MB/s*3600s*24).

He took 6000 photos during a trip to Egypt. Let's assume he can sort the photos by importance.

He'll scrap the bad photos and duplicates away, which could account for 80% of the shots.

Then select the most critical RAW photos to be uploaded to the cloud storage. In this case this could be 600 best photos, eg 18GB. To upload this would take only 2 days. The upload process can be left to be done during nights so it does not affect the normal web browsing experience during days.

If he buys the new Chromebook Pixel, he'll get an 1TB cloud storage for 3 years included with the price. That space should last for a few years for both RAW images as well as modified JPG's.

Unfortunately, if I understand the article correctly, I think that the computer that was returned was the office computer rather than the MacBook. However, if he does get the MacBook or the hard drive returned, this would be good advice if they have been wiped.

David

I misread the article. You are correct, thanks.

well, that's a serious bummer. but geez, at least leave your computer and HDs in a safe if you plan on giving someone a key to

your room.

“We didn’t find any traces of the place being ransacked and the thick dust in the room made it impossible to find fingerprints,” he added.

I would have thought that a dusty surface is exactly what u want.

It's amazing how many experts (on every subject) there is on the Thai forum. Absolutely amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

hope some good soul will bring back his life's work... feel sorry for him ... next time, put it on the cloud ?

"Branded" terabyte HDD's are cheap as dirt these days, so are hicap thumb drives and BluRay DVD's

and the writer/reader are also cheap. Safety deposit boxes in banks are not that hard to get

provided the bank has the facility (some bank branches don't) and inexpensive. If Mr. Skyum

is lucky & gets his Mac returned somehow, there is software available on the web to recover

his files...of any type. As a photojournalist myself I feel sorry for the feller however I reckon

he should have known better and only hope he has a "life's work" backup on a server somewhere.

His work is pretty good...have a look here....http://www.skyumtravelimages.com/

Anyone who's tried working with large files in cloud storage would know better than to make some of the comments I'm seeing here. Most such storage is indexed only in alphanumerics, and unless you've kept one hell of a list somewhere that carries thumbnails, it's not useful for a photographer who needs ready access to a searchable index of his work. It's storage, plain and simple. Searching through TBs of data in the cloud would be the work of more than one lifetime.

Also, what a thumb drive has to do with anything is beyond me.

I have cloud storage in addition to several terabyte drives that I store in different places. Still, my primary working database is on my two computers.

No point in bashing this guy for trusting his people too much. I'm just glad I heard this story so I can tighten up my own practices.

For me cloud storage means mainly three things.

1) It's accessible with various devices, even with mobile phone, if needed. For example I keep my shopping list on dropbox. Update it with laptop and read while on shopping center with my mobile phone.

2) Use it as an offline backup. Keep the most valuable information on cloud storage in case of total destruction of the home. The data is partly encrypted with the keys I hold.

The data is stored both on laptop(s) and also cloud storage. For example dropbox does a pretty good job to sync the data automatically.

On top of this I copy the data to NAS, in case I'll accidentally remove the whole directory which is synced to the dopbox.

3) It's pretty easy to share files with others when having, for example pictures, on an cloud storage.

As the data is stored on local storage (for example laptop's SDD), this is where most of the changes work and changes is done to the files. When the changes has been made, the data is automatically synced to the cloud.

Anyone who's tried working with large files in cloud storage would know better than to make some of the comments I'm seeing here. Most such storage is indexed only in alphanumerics, and unless you've kept one hell of a list somewhere that carries thumbnails, it's not useful for a photographer who needs ready access to a searchable index of his work. It's storage, plain and simple. Searching through TBs of data in the cloud would be the work of more than one lifetime.

Also, what a thumb drive has to do with anything is beyond me.

I have cloud storage in addition to several terabyte drives that I store in different places. Still, my primary working database is on my two computers.

No point in bashing this guy for trusting his people too much. I'm just glad I heard this story so I can tighten up my own practices.

If you are using Lightroom for your DAM, there are plugins that keep track of what you have uploaded to services like Dropbox and links to it so you can easily find what you have there.

David

“We didn’t find any traces of the place being ransacked and the thick dust in the room made it impossible to find fingerprints,” he added.

I would have thought that a dusty surface is exactly what u want.

You start wondering what kind of work the maid did.

Anyone who's tried working with large files in cloud storage would know better than to make some of the comments I'm seeing here. Most such storage is indexed only in alphanumerics, and unless you've kept one hell of a list somewhere that carries thumbnails, it's not useful for a photographer who needs ready access to a searchable index of his work. It's storage, plain and simple. Searching through TBs of data in the cloud would be the work of more than one lifetime.

Also, what a thumb drive has to do with anything is beyond me.

I have cloud storage in addition to several terabyte drives that I store in different places. Still, my primary working database is on my two computers.

No point in bashing this guy for trusting his people too much. I'm just glad I heard this story so I can tighten up my own practices.

If you are using Lightroom for your DAM, there are plugins that keep track of what you have uploaded to services like Dropbox and links to it so you can easily find what you have there.

David

I use drop box for photo backup but rarely. An old tried and true method for backup are DVDs. They're cheap and you can keep copies in several places. I have over 10 Tera of HDD now, but mostly video. It would be ridiculous to try to back that up on optical, but for photos it shouldn't be a big deal.

For photographers doing documentary style photography, cloud backups just aren't practical unless you have an amazing internet connection. He said on his trip to Egypt last September he took 6,000 photos. It doesn't mention which Canon camera he was using, but let's say it's 10 megapixels, which would produce a RAW file of about 30-31 megabytes for each photo. 6,000 x 30mb = 180 gigabytes for just one of his trips. If he's shooting all the time, cloud backups just won't work. A couple days ago I had to upload a 1.8 gigabyte file. It took 8 hours with my standard TOT plan, not to mention getting disconnected plenty of times throughout the day.

10 megapixels RAW are appx. 10MB big.. As a pro he maybe use a Canon Eos 5d mk3 with 24 megapixels what makes appx. 24MB. If you upload regularly only the difference is uploaded and therefor much quicker. As a resort owner he probably got even a faster connection than a single household.

I find it very hard to believe that someone like this doesn't back up their data away from their laptop. Keeping the laptop and backup together is asking for trouble. Feel very sorry for the guy though.

People, always keep multiple backups!

External hard drives, DVDs, cloud storage, bank safety deposit boxes, prints(!), etc. Having your life's work just sitting there on the desk was his mistake. 35 years of work....just sitting there on a desk. I don't know the location of this hotel, but what if a tsunami wiped out the hotel? What if there was a fire? What if lightning struck the building? How could you leave 35 years worth of work just sitting on a desk? Did the external hard drive have a kensington lock? Unbelievable. Honestly....this just blows my mind. 35 years of work, gone. Wow.

“We didn’t find any traces of the place being ransacked and the thick dust in the room made it impossible to find fingerprints,” he added.

I would have thought that a dusty surface is exactly what u want.

Not so. In order to "lift" a print the technician needs a clean and preferably smooth surface. They then gently add a special powder before lifting the result onto a special film. Too much dust will result in no clear image of the print. Dust will obscure whatever is under it. That is why (despite what you see on TV) it is virtually impossible to lift prints off pourous or uneven surfaces such as bricks, rusty metal, cloth, skin, and so on.

The key lesson is to have multiple backups and have them off-site and to make sure they are up to date, it's best to have an automatic service.

I hear what some have said about cloud backups but do they realise there are plenty of systems available at low cost that overcome almost every problem you raise? Just one example is one called Carbonite which I used to automatically backup my business server every day. This was the only one that offered me a truely unlimited amount of data storage. Sure the first backup upload takes around a day ( due to the large amount of data and usually slow asynchronous upload speeds on an ADSL connection) but it is all done in the background with no user effort. After that, the subsequent backups only have to backup files that are added or changed. Here is a review of 26 such services http://pcsupport.about.com/od/maintenance/tp/online_backup_services.htm

Basically there are two type of computer users. Those who have lost data and those who are about to lose data.

Edited March 13, 201313 yr by raybal5

People, always keep multiple backups!

External hard drives, DVDs, cloud storage, bank safety deposit boxes, prints(!), etc. Having your life's work just sitting there on the desk was his mistake. 35 years of work....just sitting there on a desk. I don't know the location of this hotel, but what if a tsunami wiped out the hotel? What if there was a fire? What if lightning struck the building? How could you leave 35 years worth of work just sitting on a desk? Did the external hard drive have a kensington lock? Unbelievable. Honestly....this just blows my mind. 35 years of work, gone. Wow.

Aye, talk about all your eggs in one basket.

However, many people get away with little or no backups for years and they don't realise the dangers.

As you say, it can be gone in a flash.

As Gavin310 indicated, cloud backups are OK in theory, but are too much of a pain to be useful.

True, the number of pics will be greatly reduced during the editing phase but sometimes, in time you may regret having deleted a pic that was considered as bad because, later it may be useful.

Getting a friend to hold a backup is a great idea.

I learned the hard way in 1978.

A CP/M machine with a single, 16 hard sectored, single sided 770K, 5.25" floppy.

I was learning to write assembler (Z80) and had disassembled a word processing program.

I was then commenting the "Source code" so as to understand it's processes.

Printers cost in excess of £1,000 in those days - didn't have one.

The Micropolis Floppy was also hugely expensive - only had one.

Making a backup was hard work, no utilities for a single drive but, sure I had a back up.

Max RAM 32K less 100, less the operating system.

All good, until the floppy crashed and destroyed the working disk.

Instead of using a gash boot disk first, I attempted to boot from the backup - it was destroyed.

I learned a huge lesson.

Anything of any worth is on a 10Tb workstation and on 10Tb of HDD's, plus DVD's of important photos spread between 2 locations in 1 country. (Having a friend to hold a backup for you is a super thing to do).

Then I have about 5Tb of HDD's in another country - spread on different HDD's.

Being paranoid about the loss of data is a healthy state.

Hopefully he especially offered the reward to the local police to make them lift their butts and start searching, can't be too difficult to find the stuff.