I emailed him this morning to let him know how upset I was and to go ahead and send me the pics he does have. And this is what he sent back..
I apologize again and I can assure you that with weddings I take duplicates to duplicates and backups to backups as a precaution. Engagement sessions I typically only shoot to one or two cards, but with weddings I shoot with 2 cameras that both record duplicates to 2 separate cards as I shoot. So your wedding pictures are saved in 4 seperate locations as I'm taking them. You would be hard pressed to find another photographer who backs up more than that. The only way to backup more would be to shoot with 3 or 4 cameras. Once the wedding is over I load them to your folder on my desktop and load the originals to two seperate external hard drives. One hard drive I keep at home and one I keep off site in case something should happen to my home or I am robbed. So your pictures will be saved in 3 seperate locations after the wedding while I work on the ones on my desktop.
As you can tell with weddings I take every possible precaution as I am beyond paranoid. Unfortunately, and this is no excuse, I have not taken anywhere near the same level of precaution in the past with engagement photos, although now that I have actually had a card fail on me I will surely become very paranoid with them as well. Once again I cannot apologize enough and I will glady take another 150 off your wedding so with no album and the 150 off your remaining balance is 500. Also, I would be happy to do a boudair session with you and I could not possibly charge you for it.
Sorry kinda long. So I emailed back and told him to take the 80 and put it toward my balance and then my bal would ne just 420. So im going to keep him because like I said yesterday its going to be hard trying to find someone with 6 months left to go. I really do like my photog and he was great to work with during the epic session. But im still going to ask my videographer to incl a pic package as well for extra extra backup ! Sorry so long