I cannot reiterate the "handle your gear with care" advice often enough... this past January I dropped up my 70-200/2.8L IS lens. I got away relatively cheaply, though: none of the glass got smashed up and the IS unit survived, it's the AF that went. Still was no fun - and not cheap to fix. Besides, my 100-400 was away on a long trip so I had to use the Tamron 70-300 as backup for more than a month.
More new horror along the same lines: don't try to scale canyon walls. If you just feel that itch, stow away your gear before you try. If you absolutely are too dumb to live like I am, at least put the hood on so that it absorbs some of the impact (and mud). It may sound dumb but I nearly totalled my 16-35/4L IS lens that way. I have climbed up the wall after that, though, simply on principle.
Backup. Then backup again. A month ago my laptop's hard drive bit the dust. Thankfully almost all my data is on mirrored external HDDs and (most of it also) in the cloud, but I lost some stuff after all, including the unsorted downloads and all the application profiles. I've heard people lose years worth of work due to hardware failures. Heck, I've been in the same boat around 20 years ago, that taught me to be properly paranoid about backups.
![[Image: Qdn6epGC-X8.jpg]](https://sun9-55.userapi.com/c848636/v848636328/3ec6e/Qdn6epGC-X8.jpg)
More new horror along the same lines: don't try to scale canyon walls. If you just feel that itch, stow away your gear before you try. If you absolutely are too dumb to live like I am, at least put the hood on so that it absorbs some of the impact (and mud). It may sound dumb but I nearly totalled my 16-35/4L IS lens that way. I have climbed up the wall after that, though, simply on principle.
Backup. Then backup again. A month ago my laptop's hard drive bit the dust. Thankfully almost all my data is on mirrored external HDDs and (most of it also) in the cloud, but I lost some stuff after all, including the unsorted downloads and all the application profiles. I've heard people lose years worth of work due to hardware failures. Heck, I've been in the same boat around 20 years ago, that taught me to be properly paranoid about backups.