
Photo by Jakub Zerdzicki
Marco Bellini has photographed 14 countries, seven weddings (three with the same groom), and roughly 4.2 million muffins. Last Tuesday, someone stole his laptop from a coffee shop, taking with it two terabytes of irreplaceable images. He refuses to spend money on “untrustworthy cloud storage”. He did, however, buy a very nice laptop bag – it’s also gone.
When asked whether this tragedy might finally convince him to use cloud storage, Bellini was firm. “I’d rather lose my life’s work than have to worry about someone in their basement across the world looking at my fine-art muffin shots,” he said, apparently confident that hackers worldwide are sitting idle, waiting specifically for his brioche series.
Bellini’s current backup strategy involves an external hard drive that lives in the same bag as his laptop. It was also stolen. He is now working from memory, which he describes as “basically the same thing.”
Friends have suggested pCloud, Google Drive, even Dropbox. Bellini rejected all of them, stating “I don’t trust any of them”. He has, however, spent over a decade trying to go viral by uploading photos to countless Facebook photography groups, which he feels is different somehow.
At the time of writing, Bellini was pricing new hard drives and had already identified a coffee shop with “better vibes” to leave them in.
This is a work of satire. All people, events, and baked goods mentioned are entirely fictional.
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